Twenty-five companies signed an open letter urging US policymakers not to crack down on open-weight AI models, as the White House weighs action against China's Moonshot AI.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang used his first post on X to promote an open letter signed by 25 companies and organizations defending open-weight AI models against potential US government restrictions.
"AI will transform every industry, power every company," Huang wrote. Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity while accelerating innovation, he added.
The letter, signed by Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Mistral, Palantir, IBM, Dell Technologies, CrowdStrike, and others, urges US policymakers not to crack down on open-weight AI models. Those models allow developers to download, customize, and build on top of them.
The push comes as top Trump administration officials have signaled possible action against Moonshot AI, the Chinese creator of Kimi K3, the world's most powerful open-weight AI model. White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios accused Moonshot of developing Kimi K3 by distilling the model from Anthropic's Fable 5. Distillation, the process of training a less powerful model on the outputs of a more powerful one, is a common but controversial practice. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent suggested the US could sanction companies that engage in such distillation, which he compared to theft.
OpenAI and Anthropic, widely seen as the leaders in the frontier AI race, did not sign the letter. Their flagship models are closed, proprietary systems. Both companies would stand to gain if the US blocked or impeded China-based open model makers. Other frontier AI developers, including SpaceXAI and Google, also declined to sign.
The letter does not name Moonshot directly. Its authors compare the broader development of open AI models to how open software revolutionized computing in the 1980s. "Open source did more than lower the cost of software; it created a shared foundation of knowledge on which generations of American engineers and entrepreneurs built their institutional sovereignty," they wrote.
The letter defends the distillation process. It leaves room for targeted action against proven bad actors. "Unlawful efforts to extract value from closed models raise legitimate concerns," the signatories wrote. "Those concerns should be addressed through targeted legal and commercial frameworks rather than sweeping restrictions on techniques that play an important role in AI innovation."
China has dominated open-weight AI model development despite the US's history in open-source software. Two of the biggest names in open software, Mozilla and the Linux Foundation, also signed. Nvidia's Nemotron model is one of the largest open-weight systems. Its performance trails rivals like Kimi K3. Meta Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang has said the company's Superintelligence Labs team remains committed to open models and is developing an open variant of its Muse Spark model. Reflection AI, a startup founded by former Google DeepMind researchers, is preparing its own open model.
Other signatories include Andreessen Horowitz, Hugging Face, Perplexity, Y Combinator, Box, ServiceNow, and Dell Technologies.
Nvidia shares traded at $209.13 on Friday, up 0.17%. Microsoft shares traded at $384.86, up 0.86%.
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