On July 24, 2026, Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, and 47 other technology companies, venture-capital firms, and nonprofits signed an open letter titled “Open Weights and American AI Leadership,” urging Washington not to restrict open-weight AI models and arguing that open weights are central to U.S. AI leadership. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang first shared the letter on X in what was his first post on the platform, and within a day the list of signatories had roughly doubled as additional major companies joined.<\/p>\n
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang posted the letter on X with 25 initial signatories. Several prominent AI developers were not on the original list, including OpenAI. Within a day, the coalition had grown to around 50 signatories, with OpenAI, Google, AMD, Cisco, and others added. Anthropic did not sign. The published letter frames the coalition as a broad cross-section of the U.S. AI industry, spanning chipmakers, cloud providers, model developers, and investors.<\/p>\n
Open-weight models are AI models that anyone can download, inspect, modify, and run on their own infrastructure. The letter makes several claims about their value to the U.S. economy and to AI safety:<\/p>\n
The letter makes three concrete policy asks:<\/p>\n
It also warns policymakers not to conflate legitimate model-development techniques with misappropriation, stating that distillation, the practice of using one model’s outputs to train another, should not be confused with misappropriation.<\/p>\n
The letter was published amid accusations that Chinese labs extracted intelligence from U.S. models, including Anthropic’s Fable. Washington’s response to those allegations remains unclear. Anthropic is the lone U.S. frontier AI lab not on the list of signatories.<\/p>\n
The full letter is available as a PDF on Nvidia’s site.<\/p>\n
It is an open letter signed on July 24, 2026, by Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, and 47 other companies, venture-capital firms, and nonprofits, urging Washington not to restrict open-weight AI models.<\/p>\n
Nvidia, Microsoft, and Meta were among the initial 25 signatories. OpenAI, Google, AMD, and Cisco joined within a day, bringing the total to around 50. Anthropic did not sign.<\/p>\n
The letter argues that open-weight models expand access to advanced AI, strengthen competition across the AI stack, give customers more control, and help defenders match the capabilities of attackers, and that restricting them would risk driving innovation overseas.<\/p>\n