AI Giants Including Nvidia and Meta Urge US Against Broad Open-Weight Model Restrictions

Multiple AI companies including Hugging Face, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral and Nvidia have signed an open letter urging policymakers not to impose broad “premature restrictions” on open-weight AI models. The letter arrives as Washington debates how the U.S. should respond to allegations that Chinese AI labs are stealing intellectual property from their American counterparts and growing in capability.

The letter does not mention China directly, but follows reports that the Trump administration has been considering banning Chinese open-weight models and potentially issuing sanctions against AI companies from the country. The White House has even accused Moonshot AI of distilling Anthropic’s Fable model to train its recently released Kimi K3 model.

The missive appears aimed at discouraging a total ban on Chinese models while ensuring the administration’s response to alleged Chinese distillation doesn’t spill over into broader restrictions on open-weight AI or common techniques like distillation. The letter states: “Policymakers should be careful not to conflate legitimate model-development techniques with misappropriation. Distillation… reflects a long tradition of learning from, building upon, and improving existing technologies.”

The letter also pushes back on arguments that open-weight models are inherently dangerous because they expand access to powerful models that could be used in cyberattacks. “The right response to this risk is not to prohibit open weights. In a world where cybersecurity attackers use advanced AI, defenders need access to models with comparable capabilities,” the letter reads.

The signatories’ list notably excludes OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and SpaceX — highlighting a deepening divide in the AI industry. Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have urged the administration to respond to alleged IP theft, as open-weight models’ rapid capability growth threatens their business models built on proprietary technology.

Signing companies have clear economic incentives. Nvidia, Microsoft Azure, and other infrastructure providers benefit from commoditized models: if models are interchangeable, people buy more GPUs, rent more cloud capacity, build more applications, and use more routing layers.

The letter encourages policymakers to expand compute access for startups and researchers, invest in shared training assets like datasets and evaluation frameworks, and “keep the frontier plural by avoiding premature restrictions on open models that stifle competition or drive innovation overseas.”

This open letter marks a critical inflection point in U.S. AI policy. How Washington balances addressing Chinese AI competition and alleged IP theft without crushing the open-source ecosystem that has powered much of AI’s recent progress will shape the global AI landscape for years to come.