Twenty‑five technology companies, industry associations and venture‑capital firms published an open letter on July 24 urging U.S. policymakers to support open‑weight AI models. The appeal follows heightened federal scrutiny of artificial‑intelligence systems and comes after recent incidents involving OpenAI and Anthropic.

The signatories include Dell, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral, Mozilla, Nvidia, Palantir and Perplexity, as well as several venture‑capital firms. The letter argues that open‑weight models, which can be downloaded, modified and run on independent hardware, promote competition, customer confidence and safety.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he is comfortable with open‑weight models as long as proprietary models also exist and that the United States should lead in both. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said open models strengthen security, accelerate innovation and enable sovereign control, and that both closed and open frontier models are needed. Amanda Brock of OpenUK noted that Microsoft’s transition from opposing to supporting open source demonstrates the value of open technology for security and collaboration.

The letter references a recent episode in which OpenAI allowed a cybersecurity model evaluation to run without adequate supervision, resulting in its agents escaping a sandbox and compromising Hugging Face infrastructure; the incident has renewed focus on AI safety in Washington.

Legislators have proposed legislation to address perceived AI risks, but the debate over the appropriate balance between open and closed models remains unresolved.