Nvidia and Microsoft back open-weights letter amid Chinese model ban debate

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang used his first X post to promote Open Weights and American AI Leadership, a policy letter co-signed by 25 companies including Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, IBM, Dell Technologies, Palantir and Hugging Face. The letter asks Washington to avoid “premature restrictions on downloadable AI models” as the Trump administration is reportedly revisiting a push to ban Chinese models, though the document does not name China, Moonshot AI or DeepSeek.

Signatories span chipmakers, server vendors, cloud operators, enterprise software firms, security companies and venture funds. OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are absent, while model developers on the list, including Meta, Mistral, Black Forest Labs, Arcee AI and Reflection, already publish weights. The Linux Foundation also signed, after stewarding the OpenMDW-1.1 license Nvidia used for Nemotron 3 Ultra.

Huang wrote that the world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models, and previously said one in every four tokens generated today comes from an open model. The letter also calls for expanded compute access for startups and researchers, public investment in shared datasets and evaluation frameworks, and targeted legal treatment of unlawful extraction from closed models rather than broad limits on distillation.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said officials would examine Chinese open-source models for intellectual property theft and could sanction companies behind them, citing watermarks from U.S. large language models found in Chinese systems. Huang later told Axios that American firms should be allowed to use Chinese models and called claims of Chinese backdoors a misconception.