Nvidia, Microsoft and Meta urge Washington not to restrict open-weight AI models

Roughly 20 to 25 AI and technology companies published a joint letter on July 24, 2026 urging US policymakers not to restrict open-weight AI models. Signatories include Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, IBM, Dell, Palantir, Hugging Face, Mozilla and the Linux Foundation.

The letter, “Open Weights and American AI Leadership,” argues that curbing open models would weaken rather than strengthen US leadership in artificial intelligence, and that concentrating advanced systems inside a handful of closed models creates a “single point of failure” that is harder to test, audit or defend.

The move escalates a fight building all week: it follows reported administration consideration of curbs on Chinese open-weight AI models, which surfaced a day earlier. Open weights are model files whose parameters are released for anyone to download, run and fine-tune.

Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, put personal weight behind the campaign, using the first post on his personal X account to share the letter. “Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty,” Huang said.

The signatories asked policymakers to target intellectual-property theft directly rather than restrict open weights or the distillation of models. OpenAI and Anthropic, the two largest US frontier labs, did not sign.

A coordinated letter is lobbying, not law, and the group’s commercial stake is plain: several signatories, including Meta and Mistral AI, ship open-weight systems. Whether it shifts the administration’s position is untested.