Canadian AI company Cohere joined Nvidia, Meta, and Microsoft in signing an open letter supporting open-weight AI models. Cohere co-founder Nick Frosst said the technology must be controlled by users.
Cohere, Canada's only frontier large language model developer, signed an open letter last week supporting open-weight AI models. The letter, first posted on X by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, calls for transparency in AI development. It defines open-weight models as those that can be freely downloaded, inspected, modified, and run on custom infrastructure.
The letter launched with 25 signatories including Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft, and Palantir. By Saturday it had more than 50 names. Cohere was the only Canadian-headquartered company on the list.
"This tech needs to be controlled by the people who use it, otherwise it's just another piece of tech oligarchy control," Cohere co-founder Nick Frosst wrote on X. "That's why Cohere releases open-weight and open-source models. We will keep doing that."
Nearly every major AI company has since signed on, including OpenAI and Google. The startup Ollama also added its name. Anthropic, the AI lab last valued at $965 billion, remains the holdout. It continues to use closed-weight models, a month after the US government restricted access to its latest models for foreign nationals.
Chinese open-source models like DeepSeek and Kimi have gained traction. Signatories warned against "misappropriation" of US models through distillation, a technique where one model trains another. The Trump administration has accused Chinese companies of using that method. The letter calls for "targeted legal and commercial frameworks" to address the issue, rather than restrictions on open-source models.
Cohere has pushed further into open-source this year. It released its most powerful LLM, Command A+, and a speech-to-text transcription model as open source. Frosst said on the BetaKit Podcast that open-weight releases empower users and help get models into consumers' hands, since Cohere mainly serves enterprises with its flagship product, North.
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