A 25-member coalition led by Nvidia, Microsoft, and Meta has urged US lawmakers to protect open-weight models and distillation practices, warning that strict bans threaten American competitiveness.
On 24 July 2026, in a joint open letter to US lawmakers, a major industry coalition led by Nvidia, Microsoft, and Meta urged policymakers to avoid imposing premature regulatory limits on open-weight AI models, arguing that software whose parameters can be downloaded, inspected, and run locally is essential for maintaining market competition and national innovation.
A group of 25 tech heavyweights, led by Nvidia, Microsoft, and Meta, published the joint open letter to US lawmakers titled “Open Weights and American AI Leadership”. Additional signatories included IBM, Palantir, Dell, Hugging Face, Mistral AI, Mozilla, the Linux Foundation, Y Combinator, and Andreessen Horowitz. Closed-model frontier labs OpenAI and Anthropic did not sign the letter, while Google and Amazon also abstained from initial signing.
To protect the broader development ecosystem, the signatories specifically warned against sweeping bans on model distillation—the standard industry practice of using outputs from larger models to fine-tune smaller ones—and advised that legal frameworks should instead focus on targeted enforcement against illegal downstream uses rather than restricting the underlying technology itself.
Beyond regulatory restraint, the coalition called on Washington to expand public compute resources and shared training infrastructure to prevent AI technology from concentrating within a few closed ecosystem providers. By advocating for increased public investment alongside targeted legal remedies, the group emphasised that preserving a diverse, accessible open-weight ecosystem is critical to keeping the American technology sector competitive while preventing broad-brush restrictions from stalling progress.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, shared the letter in his first-ever post on X, stating that “the world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models.” Satya Nadella from Microsoft publicly endorsed the letter, calling open-weight models “essential to a healthy AI ecosystem” and critical to American competitiveness.
The letter followed the 16 July 2026 release of Kimi K3, a near-frontier open-weight model from Beijing-based Moonshot AI, which sparked intense debate in Washington over national security and regulatory controls. Closed-source developers (OpenAI, Anthropic) had been actively lobbying lawmakers for tighter restrictions, citing potential exploitation risks from uncontrolled open-weight releases.
