Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Palantir and more than 20 other companies released a letter on Friday urging policymakers to avoid “premature restrictions” on open-weight AI models, arguing that such restrictions would stifle competition or drive innovation overseas. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said open-weight models are essential to a healthy AI ecosystem and that the effort aims to strengthen American competitiveness and expand economic opportunity while protecting national security.

Open-weight AI models are available for users to download, modify and run on their own infrastructure, and they have been the subject of debate within the tech sector in recent weeks. The letter says policymakers should not conflate distillation — the practice of using one model’s outputs to help train or improve another — with misappropriation, and that unlawful efforts to extract value from closed models should be addressed through targeted legal and commercial frameworks rather than sweeping restrictions.