Nvidia, Microsoft and 50 others urge Washington not to restrict open-weight AI

Jensen Huang waited years to post on X. His first post is a letter to Washington.

On July 24, 2026, twenty-five companies and organizations published an open letter titled “Open Weights and American AI Leadership.” The signatories include Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, IBM, Dell, Palantir, Hugging Face, Mistral, Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator, Mozilla, Replit, Perplexity and the Linux Foundation. The ask is specific: do not impose broad restrictions on open-weight models while Washington weighs a ban on Chinese ones.

The list doubled in a day

Then it snowballed. Within a day the list roughly doubled to around 50 names. Two companies conspicuously missing at launch, OpenAI and Google, signed after the fact. Elon Musk endorsed the letter too.

Still not on it: Anthropic and Amazon. In a letter designed to show a united industry front, the absences read as loudly as the signatures.

Why the timing matters

The timing is not subtle. Chinese labs keep shipping strong open models, and Kimi K3’s full weights dropped the very weekend the letter circulated. Against that backdrop, the letter argues that openness is how American AI stays competitive, from innovation to cybersecurity.

The underlying tension is real. Washington is considering restrictions aimed at Chinese open models, and the signatories worry that broad rules would sweep up American open-weight releases too. Their case: if US labs are barred from publishing weights while Chinese labs keep releasing them, developers worldwide will simply build on the Chinese stack.

What to watch

The letter is a lobbying document, not a law, and the policy fight it anticipates has not been decided. But the speed with which the industry lined up behind it, and who chose to stay off it, gives an unusually clear map of where each major player stands on open weights.

Would the remaining holdouts sign if the restrictions became real? That may be the next chapter of this story.