A group of American tech giants, including
Nvidia,
Palantirand
Meta, signed a public letter on Friday calling for US leadership in open-weight AI models, an area that
Chinacurrently dominates.
The challenge comes amid growing speculation that the Trump administration might introduce restrictions on open AI models.
These would aim to address national security risks of the fast-moving technology and combat the growing popularity of Chinese models, a move that critics say would instead hurt US innovation.
Rather than banning
open-weight AI, the US should build its own “strong, open ecosystem” and avoid “premature restrictions on open models that stifle competition or drive innovation overseas”, the three-page letter said.
Open-weight models are AI models that are released for free on the internet, allowing anyone to download and customise them for different use cases.
Proponents say that open models promote innovation and adoption by lowering the costs of using
AIand allowing end users to run the models on their own servers, meaning that user data is retained locally.