Nvidia and 24 other companies sign open-weights letter as Washington weighs Chinese AI model ban — OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google absent from the list

Nvidia and 24 other companies sign open-weights letter as Washington weighs Chinese AI model ban — OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google absent from the list None of the signatories sells access to a closed frontier model. Jensen Huang joined X last month and used his first post Friday to promote Open Weights and American AI Leadership, a three-page policy letter published the same day and co-signed by 25 companies, including Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, IBM, Dell Technologies, Palantir, and Hugging Face. The letter asks Washington to avoid what it calls "premature restrictions on downloadable AI models," and comes just four days after the Trump administration was reported to be reviving a push to ban Chinese models — though the document doesn't directly mention China, Moonshot AI, or DeepSeek. Notably missing from the co-signers are OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. The 25 names break down into chipmakers, server vendors, cloud operators, enterprise software firms, security companies, and venture funds: Nvidia, Dell, Microsoft, IBM, Box, ServiceNow, CrowdStrike, Palantir, Telnyx, Replit, Perplexity, Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator, and Emergence Capital among them. The model developers on the list, Meta, Mistral, Black Forest Labs, Arcee AI, and Reflection, all publish weights already. Also present on the list of signatories is the Linux Foundation, which stewards the OpenMDW-1.1 license Nvidia used to release Nemotron 3 Ultra in June, a 550-billion-parameter model that Artificial Analysis scored at 47.7 on its intelligence index against 53.9 for Moonshot's Kimi K2.6. "The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models," Huang wrote in his X post. At Nvidia's CES 2026 press Q&A earlier this year, he put a figure on the shift, saying one in every four tokens generated today comes from an open model. Weights that anyone can download get served from enterprise clusters, regional clouds, and on-premises racks rather than a handful of hyperscaler API endpoints, and those buyers have no in-house TPU or Trainium program to buy instead. The letter's policy section asks for expanded compute access for startups and researchers, alongside public investment in shared datasets and evaluation frameworks. The letter goes on to urge policymakers not to treat distillation — the practice of training one model on another's outputs — as misappropriation, arguing that unlawful extraction from closed models should be handled through targeted legal frameworks, rather than broad limits on the technique. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Fox Business earlier this week that the administration would examine Chinese open-source models for intellectual property theft and could sanction the companies behind them, telling the program that officials had found watermarks from U.S. large language models in Chinese systems. Huang told Axios two days later that American firms should be allowed to use Chinese models, calling claims of Chinese backdoors a misconception. The distillation passage is the only part of the letter that doesn't concern open weights. Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds. Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. Luke James is a freelance writer and journalist. Although his background is in legal, he has a personal interest in all things tech, especially hardware and microelectronics, and anything regulatory. - DS426 Replit is one of the signers. Recall for those that read about it back then and for those that didn't, they are the AI company whose AI agent went rogue on a developer that was using it.Reply https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/ai-coding-platform-goes-rogue-during-code-freeze-and-deletes-entire-company-database-replit-ceo-apologizes-after-ai-engine-says-it-made-a-catastrophic-error-in-judgment-and-destroyed-all-production-data So... obviously they want access to better models than what they were using, lololol. - alrighty_then Makes sense, also sensible that certain companies won't support this as it would hurt their bottom line. Leaves others in a strong position to make them look bad though, and they're unlikely to stop the momentum of open models regardless.Reply - hotaru251 ReplyThe letter goes on to urge policymakers not to treat distillation — the practice of training one model on another's outputs — as misappropriation, arguing that unlawful extraction from closed models should be handled through targeted legal frameworks, rather than broad limits on the technique. the fact any "ai" can have issue with it is the hypocrisy of "ai" in the open given they wouldnt even exist w/o doing that same exact thing to others works. - -Fran- Jensen, you know what else matters? All the software your Company produces to also be open, so that Intel and AMD (and anyone else) can ensure their hardware can run it in parity with yours.Reply Do we need to revisit the PhysX, proprietary FP definitions and CUDA shenanigans? How you've purposely locked anyone out of being able to use it and actively punished anyone trying to make it run in other hardware? See ZLUDA. Go on, Jensen. Open your software stack as a show of good faith or you can shove that letter in the darkest place in one of your jackets. Regards.