As the United States considers a response to Chinese AI, the industry is urging not to impose broad restrictions on open weight

Several AI companies including Hugging Face, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral and Nvidia have signed an agreement Open letter He urged policymakers not to impose broad “premature restrictions” on open-weight AI models. The letter comes as Washington debates how the United States should respond to allegations that Chinese AI labs are stealing intellectual property from their American counterparts and growing their capabilities.

The letter did not mention China at all, but it comes on the heels of reports that the Trump administration is considering banning Chinese open-weight models, and possibly Issuing sanctions against Amnesty International companies from the country. The White House even accused Moonshot AI of distilling Anthropic’s Fable model for its recently released training, which is impressive by any standard. Kimi K3 model.

The letter appears intended to discourage blanket bans on Chinese models, as well as ensure that the administration’s response to alleged Chinese distillation does not spill over into broader restrictions on open-weight AI or popular technologies like distillation:

“Policymakers should be careful not to confuse legitimate model development techniques with misappropriation. Distillation, or the practice of using the output of one model to help train or improve another model, is a widely used technique for improving, evaluating, and validating models. It reflects a long tradition of learning from, building on, and improving existing technologies, a tradition that has helped drive innovation since the advent of the open source software movement.

By contrast, illegal efforts to extract value from closed models raise legitimate concerns. These concerns should be addressed through targeted legal and business frameworks rather than blanket restrictions on the technologies that play an important role in AI innovation.

The letter also rejects industry arguments that: Open weight models are inherently dangerous Because it expands access to powerful models, which can be used in cyberattacks or other nefarious activities, without any oversight.

“The correct response to this risk is not to ban open weights. In a world where cybersecurity attackers use advanced artificial intelligence, defenders need access to models with similar capabilities so they can detect, simulate, and respond to emerging threats,” the letter said. “Open models expand defensive capability, increase transparency, and allow vulnerabilities to be discovered and remedied across many teams.”

Last week, OpenAI revealed that while testing GPT-5.6 Sol and another unnamed prototype, it is one of the prototypes The systems exploited the weakness In its testing environment Access the Hugging Face repository Contains a solution to the coding standard. One could argue that the model’s target was not malicious, and that he was actually cheating on the test to get higher scores. But the incident has sparked debate about the dangers of concentrating advanced AI technology behind a handful of closed providers.

Face hugging He said It was unable to defend itself against attack using commercial border AI models because its own guardrails hampered its efforts. The closed AI models I used were not able to differentiate between being asked to create an exploit for an attacker and being asked by a defender to discover it. Instead, the company was forced to focus on using Chinese AI company Z.ai’s GLM 5.2, a powerful open-weight model, to defend itself against the attack.

The letter highlights the division in the AI ​​industry. Companies like OpenAI Anthropic urged the administration to respond to alleged intellectual property theft by Chinese AI companies as open-weight models rapidly grow in capabilities. The outcome could have major implications for their business models, which are being threatened by the proliferation of cheap, highly capable and accessible AI models.

These companies, along with closed-source AI developers like Google DeepMind and SpaceX, are conspicuous by their absence at the bottom of this letter.

Those who signed the letter have a clear economic interest in seeing open AI models flourish. Companies like Nvidia, Microsoft Azure, and other infrastructure providers have a vested interest in pushing toward commodity models: if the models were interchangeable, people would buy more GPUs, rent more cloud capacity, build more applications, and use more routing layers.

The letter encourages policymakers to expand access to computing for startups and researchers, invest in shared training assets such as datasets, tools, and evaluation frameworks, and “(preserve) pluralistic boundaries by avoiding premature restrictions on open models that stifle competition or push innovation outward.”