Nvidia and 24 companies ask Washington not to restrict open-weight AI

Nvidia and 24 other companies signed a policy letter asking Washington not to put broad restrictions on downloadable AI models. The letter landed while U.S. officials were reportedly looking again at limits on Chinese open models, making the timing more important than the document itself.

Who signed #

The list mixes chipmakers, infrastructure companies, enterprise vendors, open-model labs and investors. Tom’s Hardware names Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, IBM, Dell, Palantir, Hugging Face, Mistral, Replit, Perplexity, Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator among the signatories. Notably, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google were absent from the reported list.

The letter argues that open models support innovation, safety research, cybersecurity and national digital sovereignty. It also asks policymakers to separate illegal extraction from the broader practice of distillation, instead of banning techniques too broadly.

Why it matters #

This is the open-weights fight becoming a Washington lobbying fight. For Nvidia and hardware-heavy AI companies, downloadable models mean more buyers can run AI on their own clusters instead of sending everything to a few closed API providers. For frontier labs, the risk is different: if the policy debate treats all open weights as a security threat, the U.S. could narrow its own AI ecosystem while trying to contain China.