Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, and more than 20 other technology companies are jointly urging U.S. policymakers to refrain from imposing broad restrictions on open-weight artificial intelligence models, arguing that the technology is essential to maintaining America's leadership in the global AI race.

In a joint letter released Friday, the coalition contended that open AI models accelerate innovation, strengthen cybersecurity, and help ensure the United States remains competitive as nations vie to develop increasingly powerful AI systems.

"Our AI leadership will be judged not by one frontier AI model, but by whether the United States builds a strong, open ecosystem that diffuses into every sector," the signatories wrote.

The industry's public appeal comes as the Trump administration weighs its approach to open-AI models following concerns raised by senior officials about Chinese AI developer Moonshot AI and its open-weight Kimi K3 model. The administration moved quickly to reshape federal AI policy after taking office in January, rescinding predecessor Joe Biden's 2023 executive order on AI safety — which had imposed government reporting requirements on developers of the largest AI systems — and replacing it with a framework oriented toward American competitiveness and innovation.

On Wednesday, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios accused Moonshot of developing Kimi K3 by distilling Anthropic's Claude 5 model. Distillation — a technique that trains a smaller AI model using the outputs of a more advanced one — has become a flashpoint in the race to develop cutting-edge artificial intelligence.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also suggested this week that the United States could sanction companies found to have improperly used distillation to appropriate intellectual property.

While defending open AI development, the coalition acknowledged that companies found to have illegally extracted value from proprietary models should face consequences.

"Unlawful efforts to extract value from closed models raise legitimate concerns," the letter states. "Those concerns should be addressed through targeted legal and commercial frameworks rather than sweeping restrictions on techniques that play an important role in AI innovation."

Open-weight AI models allow developers to download and customize a model's underlying parameters, making them more accessible than proprietary systems that companies keep closed. Meta's Llama family of open-weight models, downloaded hundreds of millions of times, has become a cornerstone of this ecosystem, enabling startups, researchers, and governments to build customized applications without depending on paid services from a handful of frontier-model providers. Some AI safety researchers and policymakers have cautioned that freely available powerful models could also lower the barrier to generating disinformation, automating cyberattacks, or assisting in the development of biological weapons — risks the coalition argues are better addressed through targeted safeguards than blanket restrictions on open-weight releases.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang amplified the effort Friday in his first-ever post on X.

"For my first post, I'm sharing a letter @NVIDIA signed on why open models matter," Huang wrote.

"AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country."

"Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty."

The letter was signed by Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Dell Technologies, IBM, Palantir, Hugging Face, Mozilla, Mistral, Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator, and other technology companies, startups, and organizations. Notably absent were OpenAI and Anthropic, two of the leading developers of proprietary frontier AI models. Google and Elon Musk's xAI also did not sign the statement.

The industry's coordinated push highlights a growing divide over how policymakers should balance national security and intellectual property concerns with efforts to keep the U.S. competitive in artificial intelligence as China ramps up investment in advanced AI systems. The outcome of that debate could shape not only domestic regulation but also export control policy, as open-weight models distributed online can be downloaded globally with limited ability to restrict access by geography.

Nvidia, Anthropic, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy did not immediately respond to FOX Business' requests for comment.