Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft and Other Tech Giants Urge US Government Not to Restrict Open-Weight AI Models

Several 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 comes as Washington debates how to respond to allegations that Chinese AI labs are stealing intellectual property from American counterparts.

The Trump administration has been considering banning Chinese open-weight models and potentially issuing sanctions against AI companies from China. The White House has accused Moonshot AI of distilling Anthropic's Fable model to train its recently released Kimi K3 model, intensifying the policy debate.

While the letter does not mention China, it appears aimed at discouraging a total ban on Chinese models and ensuring the administration's response to alleged Chinese distillation does not 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 is a widely used technique for model improvement, evaluation, and validation, reflecting a long tradition of learning from and improving upon existing technologies.

Replit CEO Amjad Masad told TechCrunch: I think banning Chinese open models is as good as banning open models in general. He noted that Thinking Machines Lab's new open model Inkling was trained with the help of Moonshot's Kimi 2.5, calling it an ecosystem and warning that the precedent a ban would set is bad.

The letter also pushes back on arguments that open-weight models are inherently dangerous, arguing that defenders need access to comparable models to detect and respond to emerging cybersecurity threats posed by attackers using advanced AI.