A coalition of twenty-five technology companies, including tech giants Nvidia, Meta, and Microsoft, has explicitly petitioned the United States government to protect open-source artificial intelligence, urging Washington not to enact policies that would kill the sector, according to Decrypt.
The companies signed a letter that defends open-weight models. The document amounts to one of the most direct industry appeals to federal officials to date, drawing a regulatory boundary around the preservation of open-source development. Rather than endorsing a specific piece of legislation, the signatories are urging the government to refrain from imposing restrictions that would effectively suffocate open-weight AI.
Nvidia, Meta, and Microsoft are named among the letter’s backers, giving the petition significant weight. With twenty-five firms in total joining the effort, the letter signals broad sector-wide anxiety that U.S. rulemaking could soon move toward limiting or banning the distribution of open-weight systems. The unified stance suggests that a substantial cross-section of the industry sees a clear line separating permissible open development from regulatory overreach that could restrict the distribution of open-weight systems.
The petition arrived just days after an incident involving Hugging Face. During that episode, a Chinese AI reportedly helped Hugging Face survive a hack that was triggered by OpenAI’s own systems, the publication notes. The proximity of the two events indicates that the practical vulnerabilities of AI infrastructure are now directly informing the policy discourse around open-source models.
By defending open-weight models so soon after an incident in which a Chinese artificial intelligence system intervened to mitigate a hack originating from OpenAI infrastructure, the signatories appear to be linking recent events to the argument for regulatory restraint. The letter does not explicitly detail how future rules should be structured, nor does it assign blame for the incident involving Hugging Face. Its core message, however, is unambiguous: open-source AI must remain viable under federal policy, and Washington should avoid any framework that effectively kills it.
The involvement of Nvidia, Meta, and Microsoft carries added weight given their position as the tech giants named in the filing. Their joint backing of the letter emphasizes the scale of industry concern. If the government were to restrict open-weight distribution, the signatories imply, the consequences would ripple across the ecosystem of openly shared model weights.
Washington is now on record as having received this collective appeal from twenty-five companies, including some of the largest names in artificial intelligence. The petition sets up a direct test of whether the U.S. government will treat open-weight models as a protected category of technology or pursue rules that the signatories argue would effectively kill open-source AI. With the letter submitted and the hack still recent, policymakers face immediate pressure to weigh industry warnings against any impulse to tighten control over openly shared model weights.