Jensen Huang's First X Post: Nvidia, Meta, and 20+ Tech Giants Urge US Not to Restrict Open-Source AI

Jensen Huang, chief executive of US chip giant Nvidia, posted on social platform X for the first time, throwing his weight behind open-source artificial intelligence models. On July 24 local time, Huang said in his post that AI will transform every industry, empower every company, and be built by every country. Open-source models can strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and adoption, and enable sovereignty. The world needs both cutting-edge closed-source and open-source models.

Huang attached a joint open letter titled "Open-Weight and American Leadership in AI." The letter was co-signed by more than 20 tech giants and prominent institutions, including Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft, Palantir, IBM, and Hugging Face. The names of the three leading US closed-source frontier AI labs — OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google — did not appear on the letter.

The letter emphasizes that open-weight models allow users to download, modify, and run on their own infrastructure, strengthening market competition and ensuring that technology benefits are widely shared rather than concentrated in a few hands.

The letter acknowledges that open-source models do carry risks — once released, they are beyond the developer's control — but the correct response is not a ban, because defenders also need access to models of equivalent capability to detect, simulate, and respond to new threats. Concentrating advanced AI capabilities behind a few closed-source models would actually exacerbate that risk.

The open letter comes amid a fierce debate within Silicon Valley and Washington over open-source versus closed-source ecosystems. Currently, Chinese open-source AI large models are rising rapidly, posing a direct challenge to leading US companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic that primarily develop closed-source models. US officials have previously accused Chinese models of distilling Western models and are weighing sanctions and restrictions on Chinese models.

The signatories warned policymakers against imposing "one-size-fits-all" restrictions on distillation technology. The letter states that distillation, which uses outputs from existing models to train new models, is a "long tradition" in AI improvement and verification, and legitimate model development techniques should not be conflated with illegal appropriation. It concludes that US leadership in AI cannot be judged solely by a single frontier AI model, but depends on building a strong open ecosystem that can permeate every industry, which is crucial for creating opportunities for innovation and prosperity across the country.