NVIDIA, Microsoft and 23 other signatories defend open models. OpenAI and Anthropic do not sign

Jensen Huang opened his X account with a letter, not a GPU

Jensen Huang opened his personal X account this week and chose something more substantial than another leather-jacket photograph. NVIDIA's chief executive shared a letter sent to the White House asking the United States not to impose blanket restrictions on open-weight models.

The document has 25 signatories, including NVIDIA, Microsoft, Meta, Mistral, Hugging Face, IBM, Mozilla, Palantir, Perplexity and Y Combinator. Chipmakers, cloud providers, AI labs, software companies and open-source organizations have found common ground.

They are not asking for an unregulated market. The letter accepts that downloadable models create different risks because anyone can modify them. Its argument is that Washington should target illegal conduct rather than placing an entire method of distributing technology under suspicion.

Open weights do not mean seeing the entire recipe

One distinction matters here. An open-weight model lets people download what the system learned during training, run it on their own servers and customize it. That does not necessarily include the full training data, training code or every decision made by its creators. It is more open than a closed API without always qualifying as open-source software in the traditional sense.

For companies, that can mean keeping sensitive information inside their own infrastructure, adapting a model to a specific job and switching providers more easily. The letter also argues that independent researchers can examine weaknesses and that competition stops a few platforms deciding who gets access and at what price.

The signatories have commercial reasons to care. NVIDIA sells the chips used by both open and closed systems. Microsoft offers its own models and those of rivals through Azure. Meta needs Llama to remain relevant. Those incentives do not disprove the argument; they explain why these companies are acting now.

The missing names matter, but they do not prove a secret pact

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Amazon are not on the list. That is notable, but it does not prove a coordinated campaign against open models. The companies do not all follow the same strategy either: Google publishes Gemma, while OpenAI has returned to downloadable weights after years focused on closed services.

Their businesses nevertheless rely heavily on products accessed through an API or a platform they control. Downloadable models let customers compare prices, host the system elsewhere and reduce that dependency. Safety and national security are part of the dispute, but so are control and revenue.

The letter follows calls from OpenAI and Anthropic for a tougher response to alleged capability extraction by Chinese labs. We recently explained why that dispute placed Jensen Huang on the other side. This new document broadens the argument beyond China to the rules America applies to its entire AI ecosystem.

The fight is not only about the best model, but who collects the toll

Huang is not a disinterested activist. In his Axios interview, he argued that cheaper and more accessible AI increases demand for data centers, servers and chips. Every company running its own model creates another place for NVIDIA to sell hardware.

Microsoft sits in an even more interesting position. It remains closely tied to OpenAI while also making money when Azure hosts models from Meta, Mistral or another competitor. Signing the letter lets it defend an open market without abandoning the closed services it already sells.

My view is that one part of the industry wants AI to resemble the internet: a foundation on which anyone can build. Another makes more money when it resembles an app store, with one owner controlling entry and taking a share of every transaction.

The letter does not decide which model will win. It does make clear who prefers selling the tools and who is more comfortable charging for access.