NVIDIA, Meta, and Microsoft have joined 22 tech firms in warning U.S. policymakers against restrictions on open-weight AI models. This follows reports that the Trump administration was weighing restrictions on Chinese AI models as China gains ground in the AI race against the U.S.
NVIDIA, Meta, Microsoft Sign Open Letter Warning Against Restrictions
In an open letter, these tech firms urged U.S. policymakers to address concerns around open-weight models through targeted legal and commercial frameworks rather than sweeping restrictions on techniques that play an important role in AI innovation. This came as these firms defended these AI models, noting that they are important to America’s AI leadership.
These Open-weight models are AI models that users can customize and run on their own infrastructure. Further commenting on these AI models, NVIDIA and these other tech firms described them as an “important part” of the foundation for America’s AI leadership because they make advanced AI more accessible, adaptable, and widely available.
Their open letter follows a report that the Trump administration was weighing restricting Chinese AI models. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said earlier this week that they will look into whether the Chinese models have been distilled from American models, while signaling that they could sanction China for “IP theft.”
However, NVIDIA and these firms said that policymakers should be careful not to conflate legitimate model-development techniques with misappropriation. “Distillation, or the practice of using one model’s outputs to help train or improve another, is a widely used technique for model improvement, evaluation, and validation,” they said.
The tech firms added that this long tradition has helped drive innovation since the rise of the open-source software movement. The U.S.-China AI race has heated up in recent times following the release of Moonshot’s Kimi K3 model, which notably ranked first on the Frontend Code Arena. This led key stakeholders, such as former White House Crypto Czar David Sacks, to warn that the U.S. could lose the AI race.
Elon Musk Shows Support For The Letter
In an X post, Elon Musk also showed support for the open letter by NVIDIA and these other tech firms. It is worth noting that Musk’s SpaceXAI is the developer of Grok, the AI chatbot, which has been put in the same conversation as Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
This has my full support.
Jensen is right. https://t.co/FubUPT6DVJ
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 24, 2026
Musk showed his support for the open letter as he responded to NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s X post. “For my first post, I’m sharing a letter NVIDIA signed on why open models matter,” Huang said.
He further noted that open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty. “The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models,” he added.
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