Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, IBM, and others back open-weight AI

Two dozen companies and organisations signed an open letter urging US policymakers to protect open-weight AI models.

The letter, published today (PDF), carries signatures from a list that spans direct commercial rivals and organisations with little obvious overlap in business model: Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, IBM, Dell Technologies, CrowdStrike, Palantir, ServiceNow, Hugging Face, Perplexity, Mistral, Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator, the Linux Foundation, Mozilla and others.

The letter’s argument centres on a comparison between the open-source software movement of the 1980s and the current fight over whether AI model weights should circulate freely or stay locked behind commercial APIs.

Open-weight models are AI systems where the trained parameters get published for anyone to download, inspect, modify and run on their own hardware. That’s distinct from closed models like the frontier products offered by OpenAI or Anthropic through API access only, where the underlying weights never leave the vendor’s infrastructure.

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