In face of US crackdown, Microsoft, Nvidia CEOs back open-weight AI models
Story by Michael Kan, PCMag, 7/26/26
After a Trump official accused Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 of cloning US tech, the CEOs of Microsoft and Nvidia are subtly nudging the White House to refrain from banning open-weight AI models from Chinese companies.
On Friday, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang tweeted a public letter about the value of open-weight AI models, which anyone can, in theory, download and run if they have the required computing resources. “The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models,” Huang wrote in his first post on X.
“Open-weight models are essential to a healthy AI ecosystem,” Nadella wrote in his own tweet.
Open-weight models are different from open-source software since the AI’s training-related code and data aren’t disclosed, thus the model’s development process can remain a secret. That said, open-weight models—which China has excelled at developing—are free to download and use, creating pressure on closed-source models that force users to go through top AI providers such as OpenAI for access. Chinese startup Moonshot’s Kimi 3 is an upcoming open-weight model that’s sent shockwaves over seemingly closing the gap with the US’s top AI models.
In talking up the benefits of open-weight models, Nadella and Huang’s letter notes that “startups, established businesses, universities, and public institutions can build on advanced models without training one from scratch or paying frontier-model prices for every task.” The 3-page document later adds: “Open weights also strengthen competition and competition is what keeps the gains of AI broadly shared rather than concentrated in a few hands.”
In total, 25 companies and groups signed the letter, including Meta, Dell Technologies, Mozilla, the Linux Foundation, and Hugging Face, which have been pushing for or stand to benefit from the open-weight approach.
The top frontier AI providers—OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google—are conspicuously absent. It’s probably because the letter says, “Startups, established businesses, universities, and public institutions can build on advanced models without training one from scratch or paying frontier-model prices for every task,” a subtle dig at frontier players.
UPDATE: On Friday afternoon, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman tweeted his apparent support for the letter. “I want the US to win in AI both in open source and proprietary models, and I am glad to see this,” he wrote. Elon Musk also tweeted his support.
On Saturday morning, Google CEO Sundar Pichai did the same, tweeting: “Very happy to support this on behalf of Google. We have long benefited from open source, are big contributors to open source and in fact have consistently made open weights models with Gemma available from @GoogleDeepMind and [DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis]. Onwards!”
The New York Times, however, reports that OpenAI and Anthropic are lobbying lawmakers and regulators to restrict open-source AI models, despite what they might be saying publicly.
Open Season on American IP?
The letter comes after White House advisor Michael Kratsios alleged, without evidence, that Moonshot created Kimi K3 by using a method called AI distillation to copy the reasoning and coding capabilities of Anthropic’s cutting-edge Fable model. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent then warned of a potential crackdown on Moonshot and other Chinese AI companies accused of cloning US tech through distillation.
“We support open-source AI and the innovation it unlocks. But open source is not open season on American IP. When PRC [People’s Republic of China] firms conduct covert, industrial-scale distillation attacks that cross the line into IP theft, sanctions and Entity List designations will be on the table,” he tweeted on Wednesday.
The controversy has created a debate over how the US should respond to China’s open-weight models. Anthropic has called out AI distillation from Chinese companies as intellectual property theft that risks unleashing powerful AI models without guardrails in place. But Friday’s open letter offers a more nuanced view: “Relying solely on closed models is not inherently safe: they can be breached, misused, or fail in ways that outsiders cannot detect. And concentrating advanced AI capabilities behind a small number of closed models compounds that risk,” it says.
The letter also argues that AI distillation is a “widely used technique for model improvement, evaluation, and validation. It reflects a long tradition of learning from, building upon, and improving existing technologies, a tradition that has helped drive innovation since the rise of the open-source software movement.
“By contrast, unlawful efforts to extract value from closed models raise legitimate concerns. Those concerns should be addressed through targeted legal and commercial frameworks rather than sweeping restrictions on techniques that play an important role in AI innovation,” it adds.
In the meantime, there’s a sign the White House might avoid a strict ban on Chinese models. On Thursday, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick tweeted that the US Center for AI Standards and Innovation evaluated Kimi K3 and found it “performs significantly below” the US’s top-tier models in cybersecurity capabilities.
“Kimi K3 remains behind America’s leading frontier AI models,” Lutnick wrote. “The United States continues to lead in frontier AI because we’re home to the greatest innovators and technologists the world has ever seen.”