Nvidia, Microsoft lead 25-company coalition defending open-source AI models in letter to US policymakers

A coalition of 25 tech companies, headlined by Nvidia, Microsoft, and Meta, published a joint letter on July 24 urging US policymakers not to impose premature restrictions on open-weight AI models. The letter argues that keeping AI models open is essential for national security, economic competitiveness, and innovation, a position that carries significant downstream implications for the decentralized tech stack that underpins much of the crypto industry. Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO, chose this letter as the occasion for his very first post on X. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also backed the effort. What the letter actually says The core argument is straightforward: open-weight AI models are safer, not more dangerous, than their closed counterparts. The letter contends that transparency enables community scrutiny, which prevents single points of failure. When thousands of researchers can audit a model’s weights and behavior, vulnerabilities get spotted faster than when a single company guards everything behind proprietary walls. Huang drew a direct parallel to the open-source software movement of the 1980s. Back then, critics warned that making code freely available would create securi...