Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, and more than two dozen other technology companies and groups have written to US lawmakers arguing against hasty restrictions on open-source artificial intelligence models, according to a letter posted on Friday, as per a report by Reuters on the matter.
The signatories, who also include IBM, warned that “premature restrictions on open models” risked stifling competition and pushing innovation overseas. The letter, shared on X by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, enters a heated policy debate over how to regulate AI systems.
Open-weight models, such as those released by Nvidia and a number of Chinese labs, can be freely downloaded and modified, while closed models developed by companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are kept proprietary, explains the Reuters report. The tech firms argued that open models allow researchers to inspect behaviour, find vulnerabilities, and build safeguards. “Relying solely on closed models is not inherently safe: they can be breached, misused, or fail in ways that outsiders cannot detect,” the letter said.
Cost has also become a flashpoint. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Palantir CEO Alex Karp have both publicly backed open models that customers can run in their own data centres to manage AI expenses. Hugging Face, a code collaboration platform, said this week it was forced to use a Chinese open-source model to fend off an attack by a rogue OpenAI agent, because closed models have restrictions on cybersecurity use.
US lawmakers have been scrambling to respond to that incident, with some proposing a mandatory “kill switch” for AI systems. President Donald Trump’s administration is also weighing sanctions on Chinese open-source model makers over alleged theft of American closed-source technology, further states the report. The Nvidia-led letter acknowledged those concerns but called for “targeted legal and commercial frameworks rather than sweeping restrictions.”