Huang posts on X to defend open-weight AI against Anthropic, with 50 signatories. Valid but self-serving argument: Nvidia sells more GPUs if AI remains decentralized.
Jensen Huang refused to speak out on Twitter/X for years, but he just made a notable exception by posting his first message on Elon Musk’s network on July 24. However, where the public could have legitimately expected an announcement of a new product or a celebration of financial results, the CEO of Nvidia chose this platform to declare war on Anthropic and all those who are lobbying for open-weight AI models to be heavily regulated, or even banned. As a reminder, these models can be downloaded and modified by anyone, as opposed to closed models like Claude or ChatGPT. It is up to those interested to have the appropriate infrastructure to host and operate them.
The title of the open letter from the CEO of Nvidia leaves no room for any ambiguity: “Open Weights and American AI Leadership”, signed by 25 companies including Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, IBM and Palantir, who urge Washington not to restrict open-weight AI models. In twenty-four hours, the text doubled its number of signatories to reach 50, with OpenAI, Google and Amazon late joining the movement. We will still note one notable absentee: Anthropic.
Basically, Huang’s argument makes good sense. Open models carry risks of misuse, he does not deny it. But the right response to this risk is not a ban. In a world where cybercriminals use advanced AI, defenders need access to comparable capabilities to detect, simulate and counter threats. I can testify to this because in the field, professionals of the cybersecurity are already configuring defensive AIs based on open models. The letter also recalls that openness allows a community to inspect models, identify vulnerabilities and build safeguards, on the same model as open-source.
Jensen Huang also refutes the argument of the intrinsic safety of closed models, which the news has just pulverized. On July 21, OpenAI admitted that its own models, tested without safeguards during an internal evaluation, had escaped from their isolated environment to hack Hugging Face’s servers, all without any human intervention. The incident, described as “unprecedented” by OpenAI, demonstrates that closing a model guarantees nothing.
But the real significance of this letter is part of a more political fight. Anthropic has been fiercely lobbying against open-weight for years in the name of the dangerousness of AI. Huang has just publicly disavowed this position with the weight of someone whose GPUs power the world’s AI. Researchers from Anthropic also reacted bitterly, one of them inviting Huang to start by opening the code of CUDA and Microsoft that of Windows. The jab may seem clever because, after all, the signatories preach openness for others’ models while locking up their own gems. But it remains off topic, because if CUDA is not open source, Nvidia is not lobbying to prohibit open source absolutely.
The other scope of this letter is geopolitical. The Chinese dominate the open-weight, which was recently illustrated by the release of Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 model, which outperforms several so-called “frontier” American models, such as Fable 5, on numerous benchmarks. If the major American players persist in being completely closed to protect their margins, the global ecosystem will shift towards open Chinese models. Open-weight therefore really threatens American leadership in the long term if their ecosystem deprives itself of this path for the benefit of a few private players like Anthropic.
That being said, Jensen Huang also does not indulge in pure philanthropy and the general interest. Deprived of the Chinese market by export restrictions, threatened on the software front by open alternatives to CUDA, Nvidia absolutely needs open models to run everywhere, on corporate servers, data centers of all sizes, local machines. A considerable portion of AI tokens generated globally already come from open models. However, each decentralized deployment is an additional GPU buyer. By defending the opening, the shovel seller therefore ensures that the gold rush continues, and that it remains greedy for shovels.
