As Washington considers tighter restrictions on open-weight AI over concerns of intellectual-property theft, Nvidia and other tech companies are pushing back
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made his debut on X to champion open-weight AI models alongside executives from Microsoft, Meta and Palantir.
As debate escalates over the implications of open-weight artificial intelligence in both Washington and Silicon Valley, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made his position clear on Friday.
In his debut post on X, Huang shared a letter signed by Nvidia (NVDA) and other major tech names advocating for open-weight AI models. "The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models," Huang wrote.
Open models publish their weights, or the numerical values that models learn during training. That means developers can download, customize and host the model locally. On the other hand, closed models, such as the ones produced by OpenAI and Anthropic, keep their underlying code and training data proprietary.
The tech industry's letter urged policymakers to keep "the frontier plural by avoiding premature restrictions on open models that stifle competition or drive innovation overseas." Open weights will expand access to AI, promoting more use cases and increasing innovation, the letter argued. That, in turn, would result in lower costs for end users, while open weights also give customers more autonomy over their technology, preventing vendor lock-in, the letter added.
Huang's post comes as the AI economy and regulators grapple with the implications of more powerful Chinese open-weight models, such as Moonshot AI's Kimi K3, which was released last week. Chinese open-weight models have brought along concerns of intellectual-property theft.
On Wednesday, White House science and technology advisor Michael Kratsios shared on X that the government had obtained information showing that Kimi K3 was distilled from Anthropic's Fable. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has warned China of potential sanctions in the case of AI model "theft."
"Distillation, or the practice of using one model's outputs to help train or improve another, is a widely used technique for model improvement, evaluation and validation," the AI-industry letter said. "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."
The letter received an outpouring of support online. Other signatories include Meta Platforms (META), Microsoft $(MSFT)$, Palantir Technologies (PLTR) and IBM $(IBM)$.
"This has my full support," Elon Musk said on X, although neither SpaceX $(SPCX)$ nor Tesla $(TSLA)$ signed the letter. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also expressed his support on X. OpenAI, Anthropic and Google $(GOOGL)$ $(GOOG)$ did not sign the letter.
Huang has been a consistent advocate for fewer restrictions on technology, repeatedly warning that U.S. export controls on chips to China won't be successful. The U.S. has limited the sale of top AI processors from Nvidia, Intel $(INTC)$ and AMD $(AMD)$ to maintain its position of technological dominance.
"They're flourishing in our absence," Huang said of Chinese chip maker Huawei in May. "They're now exporting their technology out to the rest of the world, competing with American companies."
-Christine Ji
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July 24, 2026 14:06 ET (18:06 GMT)
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