🇺🇸 BREAKING: A coalition of 25 major tech companies including NVIDIA, Microsoft, Meta, Google, Andreessen Horowitz, Hugging Face, Mistral, Perplexity, Replit and Y Combinator has published a joint letter calling on US policymakers to protect open-weight AI models as a matter of national interest.

The letter, dated July 24, 2026, draws a direct parallel to the open-source software movement of the 1980s, arguing that the US won the software era by building a shared foundation anyone could study and improve, and that AI leadership will be decided the same way.
The core argument is economic and strategic, not ideological. Open-weight models let every organization match the right model to the right job without paying frontier-model prices for every task, and they prevent critical AI capability from concentrating in the hands of a handful of closed providers.
The signatories also push back directly on the security argument used against open models, arguing that relying solely on closed systems creates single points of failure that outsiders cannot detect, while open models allow a broad community to find vulnerabilities, run red teams, and improve safety over time.
Jensen Huang amplified the letter personally. When the CEO of the company building the hardware every AI model runs on signs a letter defending open weights, it is not a philosophical statement. It is a market position.