In his first post on X, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang drew attention to how leading AI and technology companies are coming together to protect the future of openweight AI models.
“AI will transform every industry, empower every company, and be built by every country,” Huang wrote about X. “Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and adoption, and enable sovereignty.”
On Friday, Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, Mistral and others signed an open letter urging U.S. policymakers not to crack down on promiscuous AI models.
Their statement comes as Trump administration officials hint at possible action against Moonshot AI, the creator of KimiK3, the world’s most powerful promiscuous AI model, in full support of the promiscuous AI model.
“Our nation’s AI leadership will not be judged by one frontier AI model, but by whether America builds a strong, open ecosystem that permeates all sectors,” the signatories said in the letter.
When the letter was first published, the two companies most absent were OpenAI and Anthropic, widely seen as world leaders in the frontier AI model race. However, by Friday evening, OpenAI also appeared to have signed on, and the company was added to the list of signatories published by Microsoft.
OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment on signing the letter.
Unlike Anthropic’s Fable 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6-Sol, Kim K3, an open source model, will soon be available for download and customization. Both companies would stand to benefit if the U.S. government directly blocks or significantly disrupts China-based open model makers like Moonshot AI. Like Anthropic, Google did not sign the letter.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said earlier Friday that he was “thrilled” to support the indiscriminate weight model.
“I want the US to win in AI, both in open source and proprietary models,” Altman wrote in X. Below his post, a community note that still existed after OpenAI was added to the list of signatories claimed that OpenAI “refused” to sign the letter.
SpaceX is not listed as a signatory, but Elon Musk later expressed support for the message.
“I fully support this,” Musk wrote on X, quoting Phan’s tweet. “Jensen is right.”
Although the letter does not specifically mention moonshots, its authors paint the widespread development of open AI models as similar to the way open software revolutionized computing in the 1980s.
“Open source not only lowered the cost of software, but also created a shared foundation of knowledge on which generations of American engineers and entrepreneurs built institutional sovereignty,” they write.
Despite the United States’ legendary reputation for developing open-source software, China has until now dominated the development of open-weight AI models. Two of the biggest names in open software today, Mozilla and the Linux Foundation, also signed the letter.
In the US, Nvidia’s Nemotron model is one of the largest openweight models, but its performance pales in comparison to rivals such as the Kimi K3. Alexandr Wang, chief AI officer at Meta, said his Meta Superintelligence Labs team continues to work on open models and is developing open variants of the Muse Spark model. Reflection AI, a startup founded by former Google DeepMind researchers, is also preparing its own open model.
On Wednesday, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios publicly accused Moonshot of developing Kimi K3 by extracting a model from Anthropic Fable 5. Distillation, the process of training a less powerful model based on the output of a more powerful model, is a controversial but commonly used technique in AI development. At the same time, companies like Anthropic have accused their Chinese peers of abusing their distillation processes and essentially stealing their intellectual property.
Earlier this week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent suggested the United States could sanction companies that do such distillation, likening it to theft.
The letter defends the distillation process more broadly, but opens the door to the possibility that companies like Nvidia, Microsoft, and Meta may help crack down on companies that turn out to be bad actors.
“Unlawful efforts to extract value from closed models raise legitimate concerns,” they wrote. “These concerns should be addressed through targeted legal and commercial frameworks rather than blanket restrictions on technologies that play a key role in AI innovation.”
As of Friday night, a total of 32 companies, organizations and platforms had signed the letter. American Innovators Network, Andreessen Horowitz, Arcee AI, Arena, Black Forest Labs, Box, Cisco, Cohere, CrowdStrike, Dell Technologies, DoorDash, Emergence Capital, Fireworks AI, GitHub, Hugging Face, IBM, The Linux Foundation, Mariana Minerals, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral, Mozilla, Nvidia, OpenAI, Palantir, Palo Alto Networks, Perplexity, Reflection, Replit, ServiceNow, Telnyx, and Y Combinator.