Cohere joins Jensen Huang’s open-source AI letter, swelling the ranks of Silicon Valley heavyweights backing open-weight models

Canadian AI scaleup Cohere has joined a growing chorus of tech heavyweights calling for AI models to remain transparent and openly accessible. The company signed an open letter first shared on X by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang last week, which argues that open-weight AI models are essential to building a competitive and accessible AI economy in the United States.

Open-weight models are large language models that can be freely downloaded, inspected, modified, and run on custom infrastructure. The letter initially launched with 25 signatories including Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft, and Palantir, and had amassed more than 50 signatures by Saturday. Cohere is the sole Canadian-headquartered frontier LLM developer on the list.

“This tech needs to be controlled by the people who use it, otherwise it’s just another piece of tech oligarchy control,” Cohere co-founder Nick Frosst wrote on X. “That’s why Cohere releases open-weight and open-source models. We will keep doing that.”

The letter arrives as Chinese developers’ open-source AI models like DeepSeek and Kimi have exploded in global popularity. Signatories warn against the “misappropriation” of US models, including through distillation — using one model to train another — a technique the Trump administration has accused Chinese companies of employing.

Crucially, the letter explicitly opposes placing blanket restrictions on open-weight models as a response to these concerns. Instead, it calls for “targeted legal and commercial frameworks” that address misuse without undermining the open-source ecosystem that has driven much of the AI industry’s recent innovation.

Nearly every major AI company has now signed the letter, with one notable exception: Anthropic. The AI lab, recently valued at $965 billion, appears to be sticking with closed-weight models, a month after the US government temporarily restricted foreign nationals’ access to its latest models.

Cohere has made open source an explicit strategic priority this year, releasing its most powerful LLM to date, Command A+, and its speech-to-text transcription model as open-weight. As the industry’s open-versus-closed divide sharpens, Cohere’s stance positions it as a key voice in the pro-open-source camp.