Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia, OpenAI, and Palantir have a message for Washington
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, seen here via video link alongside Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, said the world needs open-weight AI models.Jeffrey Dastin/Reuters
2026-07-25T15:34:35.732Z
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In his first-ever post on X, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called attention to how some of the biggest names in AI and tech are rallying together to defend the future of open-weight AI models.
"AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country," Huang wrote on X. "Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty."
On Friday, Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, Mistral, and others signed an open letter that urges US policymakers not to crack down on open-weight AI models.
For my first post, I’m sharing a letter @NVIDIA signed on why open models matter.
AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country.
Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty.… pic.twitter.com/t02bi51N4C
— Jensen Huang (@JensenHuang) July 24, 2026
Their statement amounts to a full-throated endorsement of open-weight AI models at a time when top Trump administration officials have suggested they might take action against Moonshot AI, the creator of the Kimi K3, the world's most powerful open-weight AI model.
"Our AI leadership will be judged not by one frontier AI model, but by whether the United States builds a strong, open ecosystem that diffuses into every sector," the signatories wrote in the letter.
When the letter was initially published, the two biggest absences were OpenAI and Anthropic, widely viewed as the world leaders in the frontier AI model race. However, by Friday evening, OpenAI also signed on, adding its name to the list of signatories published by Microsoft.
Unlike Anthropic's Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6-Sol, Kimi K3, as an open-source model, will soon be available for download and customization. Both companies would stand to gain if the US government either directly blocks or significantly impedes China-based open model makers like Moonshot AI.
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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said earlier on Friday he was "glad to see" the support for open weight models.
"i want the US to win in AI both in open source and proprietary models," Altman wrote on X. Under his post, a community note, which was still present after OpenAI was added to the signatories list, claimed OpenAI had "refused" to sign the letter.
While SpaceXAI is not listed as a signatory, Elon Musk later signaled his support for the message. "This has my full support," Musk wrote on X, quoting Huang's tweet. "Jensen is right."
Google also has not yet officially signed the letter. Google CEO Sundar Pichai, however, showed his support on Saturday. He agreed with Huang in a post on X. "Very happy to support this on behalf of Google," he wrote.
That leaves Anthropic as the only major AI company yet to support open-source models.
While the letter does not mention Moonshot specifically, its authors portray the broader development of open AI models as akin 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.
China has thus far dominated the development of open-weight AI models, despite the US' legendary reputation in the creation of open-source software. Two of the biggest modern names in open software, Mozilla and the Linux Foundation, also signed onto the letter.
In the US, Nvidia's Nemotron model is one of the largest open weight models, though its performance pales in comparison to rivals like Kimi K3. Alexandr Wang, chief AI officer of Meta, has said that his Meta 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 also preparing its own open model.
On Wednesday, Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, publicly accused Moonshot of developing Kimi K3 by distilling the model from Anthropic's Fable 5. Distillation, the process of training a weaker model on the outputs of a stronger one, is a controversial yet widely used practice in AI development. At the same time, companies like Anthropic have accused their Chinese counterparts of abusing the distillation process to the point of essentially ripping off their intellectual property.
Earlier this week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent suggested that the US could sanction companies that engage in such distillation, which he compared to theft.
The letter defends the distillation process more broadly, but it does open the door to the possibility that companies like Nvidia, Microsoft, and Meta would support a crackdown on those proven to be bad actors.
"Unlawful efforts to extract value from closed models raise legitimate concerns," they 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."
In total, a combination of 32 companies, organizations, and platforms signed on to the letter as of Friday evening. They are the American Innovators Network, Andreessen Horowitz, Arcee AI, Arena, Black Forest Labs, Box, Cisco, Cohere, CrowdStrike, Dell Technologies, DoorDash, Emergence Capital, Fireworks AI, GitHub, Hugging Face, IBM, The Linux Foundation, Mariana Minerals, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral, Mozilla, Nvidia, OpenAI, Palantir, Palo Alto Networks, Perplexity, Reflection, Replit, ServiceNow, Telnyx, and Y Combinator.
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Kelsey is a senior reporter for Business Insider, where she covers business and tech news as well as stories about travel, luxury, and consulting.Her feature story "Disaster at 18,200 feet" received awards from the New York Press Club and the North American Travel Journalists Association, as well as honorable mention from the Society of American Travel Writers. It was also included on Longreads' and Pocket's best of 2022 lists. She has also received an American Journalism Online Award for her coverage on missing and murdered Indigenous people in Wyoming.She's appeared on CBS, NPR, NBC, and other outlets to discuss her work. She previously worked on the world news desk at the BBC in London and received a master's in journalism from Northwestern University.She can be reached by email at kvlamis@businessinsider.com or via the encrypted-messaging app Signal @kelseyv.21.Popular storiesDisaster on Denali: Inside a 1,000-foot fall on America's highest peakThrifting is more popular than ever. It's also never been worse.Rolex wouldn't service the vintage watch my mom inherited. Watchmakers say it happens all the time.A tiny, invasive bug and the climate crisis are changing how guitars are made, and shifting the course of music historyThe tourism free-for-all is overGovernment-run boarding schools were founded to 'civilize' Native Americans. Hundreds of dead children remain buried in the schoolyard graves.Meet the Texas minister who helps fly dozens of women to New Mexico every month to get abortionsPeople are flocking to Colorado for the great outdoors, but the air pollution is so bad, it's forcing many to stay insideInside Kabul: An aid worker reveals the devastating chaos that erupted during the US exit from Afghanistan
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Lakshmi Varanasi writes about AI and the consulting industry, exploring how artificial intelligence is transforming consulting firms like McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group, and Bain. Previously, she reported for Slate, Politico, and Reveal. Have a tip or a story? Contact Lakshmi Varanasi via email at lvaranasi@businessinsider.com or lvaranasi.70 on Signal. Recent Stories
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