Top tech leaders are frequent targets of political ire, portrayed as monopolistic behemoths wielding outsized lobbying power to crush competitors and shape congressional legislation in their favor. And yet, in a twist that defies the usual narrative, a coalition of America’s biggest tech companies has signed an open letter urging policymakers to foster a more competitive AI market, warning that premature restrictions risk entrenching the dominance of a few frontier developers and ceding valuable ground to Chinese rivals.
Well over a dozen tech giants signed the letter, including NVIDIA, Meta, Microsoft, IBM, Hugging Face, Mistral, Mozilla, Palantir, Perplexity, Andreessen Horowitz, Dell, CrowdStrike, the Linux Foundation, Y Combinator, and many others.
Not only are they worried about losing the AI race to America’s top geopolitical rival, but as debates intensify over how to spread AI’s wealth and benefits as widely as possible, many are pushing for federal equity stakes in AI firms, sweeping regulation of the technology and its data centers, and steep new taxes. The letter restates a truth we should have embraced from the start: broad, open, free market competition is the surest way to drive down costs, improve efficiency, and ensure all Americans are carried into the next generation of technological advancement and economic prosperity.
For my first post, I’m sharing a letter @NVIDIA signed on why open models matter.
— Jensen Huang (@JensenHuang) July 24, 2026
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.… pic.twitter.com/t02bi51N4C
The letter, signed just over a week ago, opens with a nod to the 1980s, when the same fears now swirling around AI first gripped the world of code.
Back then, early open-source pioneers pushed back against the orthodoxy that software could only thrive under tight corporate control. They fought for a transparent ecosystem where developers anywhere could study, tweak, and improve code. Today, that movement underpins most of the internet, powers systems at the world’s biggest tech firms, and even runs critical operations for the U.S. military and federal agencies.
However, the same instinct to regulate AI, to keep it under lock and key, has re-emerged alongside the technology itself.
"The United States now faces a similar choice with artificial intelligence," the letter reads. "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."
This is essential for creating opportunities for innovation and prosperity across the country. It requires expanding access to AI, encouraging competition, robust application layers, and giving Americans greater control over the technology they rely on. Open-weight models—AI models that anyone can download, inspect, modify, and run on their own infrastructure—are an important part of that foundation because they make advanced AI more accessible, adaptable, and widely available.
How do open models deliver on this promise?
By leveling the playing field, they give startups and non-tech companies, anyone looking to weave AI into their products, the same access to powerful models as corporate giants like xAI, NVIDIA, and Meta. They ensure that just as hackers can weaponize AI to breach sensitive data, cybersecurity experts have the same tools to detect, simulate, and defend against those threats. And they prevent a single company’s AI breach from handing attackers a permanent advantage, keeping defenders from falling behind.
"Policymakers have an important opportunity to act," the letter reads. "This includes expanding access to compute for startups and researchers, investing in shared training assets (datasets, tools, evaluation frameworks), and keeping the frontier plural by avoiding premature restrictions on open models that stifle competition or drive innovation overseas. These measures must also look at how strong application layers can expand sovereign use of AI across the economy."
The age of AI can be one of prosperity. With the right choices, open weight AI can expand opportunity, strengthen competition, extend American technological leadership, mitigate risk, and ensure that the benefits of this extraordinary technology are shared broadly across our economy. That future is worth building, and the United States should lead in building it.