And the verdict is still out on if it's going to be cheaper than employees in the long run. Maybe for companies in HCoL areas (SV/NYC), but any smaller mid-market org in a LCoL area, frontier model token spend may not end up all that cheaper when your employee salaries are $55k-$75k/year so you're mostly evaluating it as an additional force multiplier expense rather than a headcount replacer.
For hosted models, there's no way to know what the real costs are. But we know what it costs to run the open models, and moore's law tells us that it's going to get cheaper, at least for the same capabilities they have today.
Nope, not low at all. In the Midwest that’s exceedingly normal, even for non-entry level. $70k a year is living good in the Midwest, especially if dual income household ($140k a year is plenty when a decent house goes for $300k).
I think they're generalizing beyond software engineers with what they're saying. G&A, Marketing, etc roles pay significantly less than software engineers and that $55-75k figure is realistic in lower cost of living areas. Even in Colorado, which the Denver Metro Area is HCOL, there are companies (smaller, regional, not national/global) still offering that level of salary.
The product strategy of 'consumer-grade' AI making deliberately insecure software, and then selling you limited access to the model that can fix it (if they think you deserve to pay them) is just diabolical.
(Grade 3 AI which can hack both previous tiers is exclusively sold to the highest bidder.)
Makes sense for Microsoft. Copilot is already capable of being model agnostic (both GH Copilot, obviously, and M365 as well). They're an enterprise software & services company, they want to sell integrated AI tooling in their stack, powered by whatever models their customers want rather than any specific model.
Models are quickly becoming a dumb pipe, like an ISP. Just a commodity. The labs should rightfully be terrified, eventually the value isn't going to come from the model itself but the tools & integrations built on top. Non-tech businesses and non-tech employees don't want to buy API access to a model, they want to buy off the shelf software with its capabilities packaged up into a pretty, easy to use GUI.
I don't know about that, a lot of those bloated enterprise solutions are becoming obsolete fast, and integrations becoming a moot point as these models advance.
I posted earlier on reddit that at this point, the closed source lobby wanting to ban open weights is effectively outgunned (musk also publicly supported this).
The future will probably have most of all companies running local models, simply because the alternative would be essentially every company that uses LLMs ending up becoming completely dependent upon Anthropic et al. And that dependence would be milked to the point of absurdity once solidly established.
And as a more general point - more major competitors in a domain is very good for everybody except those competitors themselves, who would rather there be as few as possible.
They've seen the government officials parroting OpenAI and Anthropic lobbies talking points, and they have smart enough people to see the signs of upcoming regulatory capture.
If I were cynical, I'd say it isn't helped by the current US administration.
Nvidia is subject to export restrictions on GPUs to China. So Chinese labs have responded by allowing American hosts to run their open-weight models in the US, where there are no restrictions. We see this in the EU too where Scaleway, and now Hetzner are getting into the inference host space serving Chinese open-weight models.
So Nvidia benefits from more inference providers running many Chinese models that they otherwise would not have been able to service.
Oh, that’s interesting. I think the general expectation was that blocking exports to China would result in companies there building their own cards competing with NVIDIA. If it has incentivized them to release open weight models instead, that seems like an unexpected win.
Different companies have different motivations. I'm sure some are genuine, but a lot of them simply lost the race (to OpenAI/Anthropic/Google) and know they can't compete anymore, so are shifting strategies. How many times has Microsoft done exactly this in the past?
looking at both openai and anthropic; they are winning something, but a sober look at their finances will make you silently mouth "but what did they win".
Probably the fact that they don't want Anthropic or Google or OpenAI to have access to their data theoretically, and that they do want to use good AI, and that they don't want to spend the money themselves to make a good model...
If there are effectively only two AI companies allowed to train or run model inference then demand for hosting, GPUs and data centers goes down, so they'd be able to squeeze their suppliers that much more too.
Probably a real effort to push for some kind of sanctions or commerce block on Chinese models. Anthropic just doubled their political spending to $40 mil for the midterms to push for "AI Safety."
They really don't need to be very worried about that. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, et al have decades of experience in shipping custom hardware at scale, and it is not a simple field to pivot into
True, but Google has their own models and did not sign this either.
The other thing that comes to mind is they want to avoid the government from banning open models as has been suggested by some of the closed models providers.
To some degree even unintentionally this is all inevitable. I know this isn’t what you’re taking about, but it’s a similar line of thought. These models are consuming public free information, and they’re all also producing free public information, so they’re all pissing and drinking into same pool.
If we go down the line of dead internet theory which I’m becoming more convinced of these days, the volume of information that’s not necessarily original or extracted from reality and just interpolated and extrapolated from existing information in different ways by LLMs will greatly outnumber human information coming up.
In which case these models should.. start to converge on the same data I imagine, with slightly different behaviors within that. One big generative orgy feedback loop.
The list of companies that signed this letter is telling (including Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft). Equally telling is the list of companies that did not sign it -- including Google, Amazon.
MSFT, dell, NVIDIA. These guys will make money no matter who uses what AI since they're the hardware providers. Even though they all own stake in frontier labs, chinese open weight models will commoditize the intelligence layer.
The Chinese open models are way ahead, not by how capable they are compared to frontier models, but on how they project to the world and how they improve over time.
Companies that are hurt by open weight models fight against them.
Companies that benefit from open weight models fight overregulation.
Color me surprised.
I don't feel it's meaningful to berate the point anymore about the hypocrisy of the American labs. Now as the sentiment and effort from them to push for regulation increases so does my perception of how pathetic they are behaving. I'm not sure how else to say it other than that it's honestly just embarrassing to watch China and others run circles around us in the USA.
Maybe less shocking, but still, so is google. I know they are one of the labs, but that being said they rely far less on gemini for revenue as opposed to the big 2.
I think Google can play both sides here: they may end up a frontier lab if OpenAI/Anthropic dissolve, or a regular LLM provider, in which case they could be serving open models.
I'm finding the list of signatories on this letter really interesting and somewhat confusing, looking purely through the lens of economic interest.
It makes sense to see Meta, the startups, and the VC firms on this list. And it makes sense to see OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google all missing. Microsoft is somewhat unexpected to me. I don't think of them as having a focus on open weight models (no more than Google), and they have a large stake in OpenAI. Maybe they're looking at this from the angle of Azure providing compute. But then why is Amazon missing, when it has AWS?
And of course, we don't see DeepSeek, Moonshot, or Z.ai on here. The letter is about American technological leadership after all. But then we _do_ see the French company Mistral! Mistral who released [a playbook](https://europe.mistral.ai/) for Europe becoming a self-reliant AI powerhouse.
I assume all of this is in the context of influencing the Trump administration's thinking on Chinese open weights models. But the letter is really about _American_ open weights models. The call to action is all about keeping the American open weights ecosystem competitive. I didn't even realize that was under threat, so I feel like I'm missing something.
Both the CEO of Palantir and the CEO of Microsoft have recently criticized very strongly the business model of OpenAI and Anthropic.
Therefore it is no surprise that both companies are among the signatories.
The motivation of Palantir is very transparent, they have launched a product created in cooperation with NVIDIA, which is a turnkey system (Sovereign AI) that includes all hardware (i.e. a rack with servers full of NVIDIA GPUs) and all software needed by a company to run on its premises LLM inference and also training/fine tuning.
Thus the Palantir product competes with OpenAI and Anthropic and it benefits from the existence of open weights LLMs.
The motivation of Microsoft is more obscure for now, but because its criticism was very similar to that of Palantir, about how dangerous it is for corporations to delegate the processing of their AI needs to external entities like OpenAI and Anthropic, I assume that Microsoft is also going to propose an alternative to using remotely the OpenAI and Anthropic APIs.
Unlike Palantir, Microsoft is not likely to suggest self-hosting on premises, but I suppose that they might promote self-hosting on some kind of instances rented from Azure.
> But the letter is really about _American_ open weights models.
AI models don’t really have nationality. They don’t have race/ethnicity fields on their model cards. It’s impossible to determine the country of origin of a model by looking at their weights. There is no DNA test for AIs. They exist in a mathematical space where human-made borders make no sense.
This means IF there is a regulation for open weight models, it has to apply to ALL open weight models. There is no any other option, since you can always train/fine-tune a model to change it’s weights and rebrand it as a new model.
Commoditization of the model layer is to Azure's benefit. It would help to avoid the model layer becoming a platform that commoditizes cloud into a pure bare metal business. It also redistributes 'consumer' surplus back to the end user via a lower effective price, which would conceivably increase demand for IaaS and/or PaaS which are complements.
My hunch is they are all seeing the problems at OpenAI and some other collateral damage on the horizon. They don’t want the US government intervening to try to save OpenAI. A little controlled burn is probably good for the industry long term.
MS is playing literally all the sides in this whole AI thing. They are a massive investor in oAI, and have lots of rights to use their models for a long time. They also have the cloud where they offer inference w/ all the benefits of already being there, data retention, etc. They also have a research wing that can build models (rumours are they're aiming for frontier-ish). I don't think there's currently an angle in this AI thing that MS hasn't aimed for.
(a) sellers of hardware (Nvidia, IBM) and those who rent hardware out to others (Amazon, Microsoft)
They want open models because they don't have to license it to run it on their hardware, so they can offer lower cost and inspect what they are offering to clients
(b) open model creators (Arcee, Perplexity, Mistral, IBM, Microsoft)
...who would be unable to work if open-weight models are banned
(c) Software-heavy companies ( Mozilla, The Linux Foundation , ServiceNow, Microsoft, IBM, heck all of them)
...who want models that are cheap to run because that reduces the cost of running an LLM (whether you are trying to replace a software developer or just assist them, the value of a reduced cost LLM is directionally the same)
> The call to action is all about keeping the American open weights ecosystem competitive. I didn't even realize that was under threat, so I feel like I'm missing something.
OpenAI and Anthropic can bring American open-weight model providers like Meta to court but not the Chinese. Chinese companies breaking American IP law (whether the law is correct or not) are basically immune. This has been going on forever, I guess enough is at stake finally for the federal government to care.
It helps to understand there are multiple factions within the white house and trump admin. One faction is very hawkish towards allies and enemies, especially China. Another is the one sending ICE to invade American cities, the Christian nationalism and such. Another is very focused on wealth expansion for friends and family. There is an amount of Venn to these groups.
It makes a ton of sense to see this sort of joint effort being made by these enormous companies, but man, there's some part of me that can't help but feel grossed out knowing the best way to get the US to make the right choice is to have a handful of elite business people say it'd be bad for them.
Yeah, this letter is just proof of (the by now long standing fact) of corporate power/corporate capture of American governance. Tons of popular protests against big AI? Makes no difference. Joint corporate letter about big AI? Possibly the government will do something.
What does copyright have to do with anything? You also cannot copyright an encryption algorithm, but the US Government banned essentially mathematics for YEARS[0].
At the end of the day, these companies that signed this letter have more cash. What they should do is bring some money together, more money than the other side, donate it and buy their way. That's the 2026 way, no one has time for all this letter and protest. How much are they willing to put on the line?
The issue is not open weights as a whole, indeed Hegseth himself said they are important for America (if American made, presumably); the issue is Chinese models, whether open or not, and that's what's looking to be banned, and nothing in this article suggests otherwise.
The conversation going on in the industry is a bit broader than that. OpenAI's head of strategic futures just said last week that open models are inherently decelerationist, ungovernable, and will slow development on the frontier. You'll notice OpenAI does not appear as a signatory here despite their relationship with Microsoft.
>open models are inherently decelerationist, ungovernable, and will slow development on the frontier
Ungovernable makes intuitive sense, but I don’t understand how open weight models could be decelerationist or slow the development of the frontier. Was there an argument for those positions?
Open weight models challenge the "winner takes all" hypothesis, which motivates the astronomical valuations and acts as a justification for trains of cash dumped into AI development.
In other words, if AI models become a commodity, the "AI leaders" will not be able to burn the cash like they do today, thus resulting in a "slower" (one could say instead "more sustainable") development of AI models.
It's a copy/paste of the arguments against open source software from decades ago. The argument goes: innovation requires profit motive, and profit motive requires IP rights. Of course, this was soundly disproven in software and I don't see any reason it should be different here.
Well of course OpenAI and Anthropic say those sorts of things, it's what they've always said, particularly Anthropic, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's the position of the US government. In other words the government seems to be listening to some but not all of the lobbying done by the big two.
The guy who said those things just joined OpenAI in the last month. He was previously a senior policy advisor, specifically on AI, to the current administration in the White House.
I don't know that the US government has a unified position on open source AI. But it's not like this isn't a discussion happening among policymakers.
> ...the issue is Chinese models, whether open or not, and that's what's looking to be banned...
Is the US planning to invade China and take away their models? Because otherwise China is still going to have the models even if the US bans them. I don't think they're going to be going with the US position on this one.
It's the same patronizing nonsense as when all the US webcos pulled out of the Chinese market in some misguided supposed protest believing the Chinese so incapable of rolling their own Google, Amazon or WhatsApp they will come begging the americans to go back. Now the western tech universe goes to China for ideas.
If by "pulled out of the Chinese market" you mean "were hacked by the Chinese government in a way that compromised their intellectual property and the safety of dissidents", then yes [0]
The point is did the US reaction work or was it completely counter productive?
Then will attempting to cutoff China again today work or do we expect that also will prove to achieve the exact opposite of what its proponents are claiming?
Banned in the US, obviously, not worldwide. The problem is if the US wanted to, they actually could enforce such a ban nearly worldwide, by putting Chinese AI companies on a sanctions list and disallowing any US company (or anyone that does business with a US company, which is much of the world) from touching them.
Why anyone would care what Hegseth thinks about open weight models? What's wrong with Chinese models? The censorship? I think it's good to have diversity of opinion. Get US flavored output on sensitive subjects from US models and ZH on ZH models. That's a useful tool.
> Open source did more than lower the cost of software; it created a shared foundation of knowledge on which generations of American engineers and entrepreneurs built their institutional sovereignty
Hey nvidia, what about making your full set of linux drivers open source?
I mean, I do agree that being open is important but you're hijacking the narrative here, and I suspect being open have nothing to do with any of this.
i'm glad someone else sees this too. There's nothing open source about an open-weight model. I feel like they're just trying to associate themselves with open source and the positive impacts it has had on software technolgoy.
Great, how about some frontier models like China seems to be doing on a weekly basis at this point. Give us a CoPilot variant that's open source & open weights.
I don't personally have a horse in this race, but if you want to accurately predict the next step:
Start with the outcome you believe will be the most in line with the spirit and traditions of the open source community. This is precisely what won't happen.
It won't necessarily be the inverse. It could be, of course, but it's also likely to be a compromise between the two.
For a topical example: The companies doing "AI" layoffs aren't doing so out of a sense of having failed their staff that helped carry them so far. Often, these announcements come on the heels of record-breaking profits. They're doing it out of contempt for workers.
See https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/cory-doctoro... for Doctorow's take on centaurs vs. reverse centaurs. Broadly speaking: C-suite business leadership wants reverse centaurs. Workers want centaurs. Unless you have a union (or some other collective bargaining power structure that I'm not aware of), the C-suite calls the shots.
The same can be said of the current administration. They don't give a fuck what most of us want on any given issue. They're captured by an aggressive ideology. Their only incentive is to be able to spin their decision to make themselves look good; to posture as "strong" leadership.
Ideology? I think this administration is the least captured by ideology in the last few decades. It's mostly brazen self-interest, for both entertainment & profit.
> Start with the outcome you believe will be the most in line with the spirit and traditions of the open source community
there's nothing open source about an open weight model. It's more like the binary blobs Linux fought so hard against. If you can't compile, or in this case train, from source then you're missing the "source" part of open source.
It's not worthless, you don't have to agree with P on everything, or make it personal - it works as strictly business - only where and when appropriate.
I agree with the message, but I'm not going to accept it from this particular crowd.
Microsoft, NVIDIA, Meta, Palantir, IBM...They have all been actively hostile to open source for decades, and have a history of embracing it only when convenient and profitable.
Microsoft benefited from its close partnership with OpenAI for years right up until it went sour. Where was this enthusiasm for open weights then?
Meta was developing open models and then abandoned that effort in search for profits. Muse Spark is now fully closed.
All these companies have the resouces to train and release frontier open weights models today, but choose not to. So spare me the marketing and virtue signaling.
I’ll never forgive Microsoft for their hostile actions against open source and open standards in the 90s. I’ll never believe any endorsement from them of open-anything.
Yeah, the endorsement logos at the bottom are majority bad actors with regards to openness in code. Many are bad actors with regards to openness in _society_.
From yesterday:
Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49023016 - July 2026 (841 comments)
Also related:
OpenAI and Anthropic unite against open-weight AI risks to their bottom line - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49020868 - July 2026 (330 comments)
China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48979269 - July 2026 (932 comments)
The gap between open weights LLMs and closed source LLMs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48692058 - June 2026 (250 comments)
The unbearable cheapness of open weight models - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48668255 - June 2026 (186 comments)
> The unbearable cheapness of open weight models
So the closed model try to get client with their model by saying it's cheaper than employees, and then turn around to lawyer-out cheaper alternative?
Truly the american dream.
The important thing is that Sam Altman and Dario Amodei become trillionaires. Everything must be decided in service of that one primary goal.
And the verdict is still out on if it's going to be cheaper than employees in the long run. Maybe for companies in HCoL areas (SV/NYC), but any smaller mid-market org in a LCoL area, frontier model token spend may not end up all that cheaper when your employee salaries are $55k-$75k/year so you're mostly evaluating it as an additional force multiplier expense rather than a headcount replacer.
For hosted models, there's no way to know what the real costs are. But we know what it costs to run the open models, and moore's law tells us that it's going to get cheaper, at least for the same capabilities they have today.
Those salaries seem low for mid sized cities even no?
Nope, not low at all. In the Midwest that’s exceedingly normal, even for non-entry level. $70k a year is living good in the Midwest, especially if dual income household ($140k a year is plenty when a decent house goes for $300k).
I think they're generalizing beyond software engineers with what they're saying. G&A, Marketing, etc roles pay significantly less than software engineers and that $55-75k figure is realistic in lower cost of living areas. Even in Colorado, which the Denver Metro Area is HCOL, there are companies (smaller, regional, not national/global) still offering that level of salary.
Yeah that would make more sense. Though it seems to me AI is currently better at reducing dev headcount than most other roles.
55k??
Some irony: I subscribe to Claude and Codex (20x plans), and now Kimi.
Why Kimi? because K3 is the only frontier model I can have a serious conversation with about my product's security.
(I did apply for OpenAi's Cyber Pilot but got no response)
The product strategy of 'consumer-grade' AI making deliberately insecure software, and then selling you limited access to the model that can fix it (if they think you deserve to pay them) is just diabolical.
(Grade 3 AI which can hack both previous tiers is exclusively sold to the highest bidder.)
Just saw on Microsoft
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/top...
Makes sense Microsoft is placing it self as a model host and os providing open weight models for much cheaper on their infra already.
No wonder openai and anthropic are terrified
Makes sense for Microsoft. Copilot is already capable of being model agnostic (both GH Copilot, obviously, and M365 as well). They're an enterprise software & services company, they want to sell integrated AI tooling in their stack, powered by whatever models their customers want rather than any specific model.
Models are quickly becoming a dumb pipe, like an ISP. Just a commodity. The labs should rightfully be terrified, eventually the value isn't going to come from the model itself but the tools & integrations built on top. Non-tech businesses and non-tech employees don't want to buy API access to a model, they want to buy off the shelf software with its capabilities packaged up into a pretty, easy to use GUI.
I don't know about that, a lot of those bloated enterprise solutions are becoming obsolete fast, and integrations becoming a moot point as these models advance.
I posted earlier on reddit that at this point, the closed source lobby wanting to ban open weights is effectively outgunned (musk also publicly supported this).
The oddly reminds me of back in the day when SOPA had caused a similar stir (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act), and all HN was up in arms against it.
I wonder what is happening behind closed doors for these companies to be issuing such a joint letter.
NVIDIA sells the tools. The more the better it is for them.
Microsoft and Meta are also-rans at this point. Their best hope of catching up is probably leveraging their infra and open models.
"leveraging their infra" is a pretty solid play, considering the scope of investments these two companies have made thus far.
It does however totally abandon the question of making a profitable mass-market AI product upon which the scale of those investments was based.
The future will probably have most of all companies running local models, simply because the alternative would be essentially every company that uses LLMs ending up becoming completely dependent upon Anthropic et al. And that dependence would be milked to the point of absurdity once solidly established.
And as a more general point - more major competitors in a domain is very good for everybody except those competitors themselves, who would rather there be as few as possible.
Is that different from how companies are reliant on cloud computing?
Yes. No law prevents you from provisioning and using your own hardware.
They've seen the government officials parroting OpenAI and Anthropic lobbies talking points, and they have smart enough people to see the signs of upcoming regulatory capture.
If I were cynical, I'd say it isn't helped by the current US administration.
Nvidia is subject to export restrictions on GPUs to China. So Chinese labs have responded by allowing American hosts to run their open-weight models in the US, where there are no restrictions. We see this in the EU too where Scaleway, and now Hetzner are getting into the inference host space serving Chinese open-weight models.
So Nvidia benefits from more inference providers running many Chinese models that they otherwise would not have been able to service.
Oh, that’s interesting. I think the general expectation was that blocking exports to China would result in companies there building their own cards competing with NVIDIA. If it has incentivized them to release open weight models instead, that seems like an unexpected win.
Different companies have different motivations. I'm sure some are genuine, but a lot of them simply lost the race (to OpenAI/Anthropic/Google) and know they can't compete anymore, so are shifting strategies. How many times has Microsoft done exactly this in the past?
looking at both openai and anthropic; they are winning something, but a sober look at their finances will make you silently mouth "but what did they win".
They want to be the successor to Enron.
Probably the fact that they don't want Anthropic or Google or OpenAI to have access to their data theoretically, and that they do want to use good AI, and that they don't want to spend the money themselves to make a good model...
If there are effectively only two AI companies allowed to train or run model inference then demand for hosting, GPUs and data centers goes down, so they'd be able to squeeze their suppliers that much more too.
Probably a real effort to push for some kind of sanctions or commerce block on Chinese models. Anthropic just doubled their political spending to $40 mil for the midterms to push for "AI Safety."
They are worried about OpenAI and Anthropic making their own processors and controlling the whole stack is my guess.
They really don't need to be very worried about that. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, et al have decades of experience in shipping custom hardware at scale, and it is not a simple field to pivot into
True, but Google has their own models and did not sign this either.
The other thing that comes to mind is they want to avoid the government from banning open models as has been suggested by some of the closed models providers.
It would be interesting to know how many optimizations of the Chinese models were incorporated back into Claude and Codex.
To some degree even unintentionally this is all inevitable. I know this isn’t what you’re taking about, but it’s a similar line of thought. These models are consuming public free information, and they’re all also producing free public information, so they’re all pissing and drinking into same pool.
If we go down the line of dead internet theory which I’m becoming more convinced of these days, the volume of information that’s not necessarily original or extracted from reality and just interpolated and extrapolated from existing information in different ways by LLMs will greatly outnumber human information coming up.
In which case these models should.. start to converge on the same data I imagine, with slightly different behaviors within that. One big generative orgy feedback loop.
The list of companies that signed this letter is telling (including Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft). Equally telling is the list of companies that did not sign it -- including Google, Amazon.
> Equally telling is the list of companies that did not sign it -- including Google, Amazon.
Could you elaborate? I don't understand your implication.
Amazon in particular hosts open weight models via Amazon Bedrock (e.g. Ministral 14B 3.0, DeepSeek V3.2, ...)[1].
In case it changes the context of this comment, I am a Meta employee, all opinions are my own.
[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock/latest/userguide/model-c...
So the people lagging in the commercial model game are issuing this warning? Got it.
If you see the long 3rd paragraph twice, know that you are not alone.
MSFT, dell, NVIDIA. These guys will make money no matter who uses what AI since they're the hardware providers. Even though they all own stake in frontier labs, chinese open weight models will commoditize the intelligence layer.
Reassuring to see this backed by major players.
This is the correct stance, hopefully this is the stance that prevails.
"the companies with the most to lose saw which way the wind was blowing and switched sides" mightve been an apt title.
Would be nice to see standardized open weight classes: 12B, 24B, 48B… Who can make the best open model in each weight class.
Hopefully something good comes from this... But I certainly don't see the big players caving in: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47929951>
The Chinese open models are way ahead, not by how capable they are compared to frontier models, but on how they project to the world and how they improve over time.
Companies that are hurt by open weight models fight against them. Companies that benefit from open weight models fight overregulation. Color me surprised.
I don't feel it's meaningful to berate the point anymore about the hypocrisy of the American labs. Now as the sentiment and effort from them to push for regulation increases so does my perception of how pathetic they are behaving. I'm not sure how else to say it other than that it's honestly just embarrassing to watch China and others run circles around us in the USA.
I wonder why Apple stayed absent from signing this?
Maybe less shocking, but still, so is google. I know they are one of the labs, but that being said they rely far less on gemini for revenue as opposed to the big 2.
I think Google can play both sides here: they may end up a frontier lab if OpenAI/Anthropic dissolve, or a regular LLM provider, in which case they could be serving open models.
This would support the hypothesis that they are incentivized as compute providers and not simply because they're losing the frontier llm race
I wonder if it has anything to do with Apple’s legal case against OAI.
If it doesn't involve a walled garden subject to Apple's domination and control, it's not an Apple product.
Apple is allergic to industry-spanning consortiums.
I thought it would've made a lot of sense for Apple to be on this list as well.
Apple would be rather unaffected since they already signed a deal with Google/Gemini.
Because their long-term goal is to make AI a walled garden subscription.
I'm finding the list of signatories on this letter really interesting and somewhat confusing, looking purely through the lens of economic interest.
It makes sense to see Meta, the startups, and the VC firms on this list. And it makes sense to see OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google all missing. Microsoft is somewhat unexpected to me. I don't think of them as having a focus on open weight models (no more than Google), and they have a large stake in OpenAI. Maybe they're looking at this from the angle of Azure providing compute. But then why is Amazon missing, when it has AWS?
And of course, we don't see DeepSeek, Moonshot, or Z.ai on here. The letter is about American technological leadership after all. But then we _do_ see the French company Mistral! Mistral who released [a playbook](https://europe.mistral.ai/) for Europe becoming a self-reliant AI powerhouse.
I assume all of this is in the context of influencing the Trump administration's thinking on Chinese open weights models. But the letter is really about _American_ open weights models. The call to action is all about keeping the American open weights ecosystem competitive. I didn't even realize that was under threat, so I feel like I'm missing something.
Both the CEO of Palantir and the CEO of Microsoft have recently criticized very strongly the business model of OpenAI and Anthropic.
Therefore it is no surprise that both companies are among the signatories.
The motivation of Palantir is very transparent, they have launched a product created in cooperation with NVIDIA, which is a turnkey system (Sovereign AI) that includes all hardware (i.e. a rack with servers full of NVIDIA GPUs) and all software needed by a company to run on its premises LLM inference and also training/fine tuning.
Thus the Palantir product competes with OpenAI and Anthropic and it benefits from the existence of open weights LLMs.
The motivation of Microsoft is more obscure for now, but because its criticism was very similar to that of Palantir, about how dangerous it is for corporations to delegate the processing of their AI needs to external entities like OpenAI and Anthropic, I assume that Microsoft is also going to propose an alternative to using remotely the OpenAI and Anthropic APIs.
Unlike Palantir, Microsoft is not likely to suggest self-hosting on premises, but I suppose that they might promote self-hosting on some kind of instances rented from Azure.
> But the letter is really about _American_ open weights models.
AI models don’t really have nationality. They don’t have race/ethnicity fields on their model cards. It’s impossible to determine the country of origin of a model by looking at their weights. There is no DNA test for AIs. They exist in a mathematical space where human-made borders make no sense.
This means IF there is a regulation for open weight models, it has to apply to ALL open weight models. There is no any other option, since you can always train/fine-tune a model to change it’s weights and rebrand it as a new model.
Commoditization of the model layer is to Azure's benefit. It would help to avoid the model layer becoming a platform that commoditizes cloud into a pure bare metal business. It also redistributes 'consumer' surplus back to the end user via a lower effective price, which would conceivably increase demand for IaaS and/or PaaS which are complements.
My hunch is they are all seeing the problems at OpenAI and some other collateral damage on the horizon. They don’t want the US government intervening to try to save OpenAI. A little controlled burn is probably good for the industry long term.
> Microsoft is somewhat unexpected to me
MS is playing literally all the sides in this whole AI thing. They are a massive investor in oAI, and have lots of rights to use their models for a long time. They also have the cloud where they offer inference w/ all the benefits of already being there, data retention, etc. They also have a research wing that can build models (rumours are they're aiming for frontier-ish). I don't think there's currently an angle in this AI thing that MS hasn't aimed for.
Signatories appear to group into
(a) sellers of hardware (Nvidia, IBM) and those who rent hardware out to others (Amazon, Microsoft)
They want open models because they don't have to license it to run it on their hardware, so they can offer lower cost and inspect what they are offering to clients
(b) open model creators (Arcee, Perplexity, Mistral, IBM, Microsoft)
...who would be unable to work if open-weight models are banned
(c) Software-heavy companies ( Mozilla, The Linux Foundation , ServiceNow, Microsoft, IBM, heck all of them)
...who want models that are cheap to run because that reduces the cost of running an LLM (whether you are trying to replace a software developer or just assist them, the value of a reduced cost LLM is directionally the same)
> The call to action is all about keeping the American open weights ecosystem competitive. I didn't even realize that was under threat, so I feel like I'm missing something.
OpenAI and Anthropic can bring American open-weight model providers like Meta to court but not the Chinese. Chinese companies breaking American IP law (whether the law is correct or not) are basically immune. This has been going on forever, I guess enough is at stake finally for the federal government to care.
Google and Amazon both have incredibly large compute deals with frontier labs and GovCloud. They may not want to sour on that cash.
It helps to understand there are multiple factions within the white house and trump admin. One faction is very hawkish towards allies and enemies, especially China. Another is the one sending ICE to invade American cities, the Christian nationalism and such. Another is very focused on wealth expansion for friends and family. There is an amount of Venn to these groups.
It makes a ton of sense to see this sort of joint effort being made by these enormous companies, but man, there's some part of me that can't help but feel grossed out knowing the best way to get the US to make the right choice is to have a handful of elite business people say it'd be bad for them.
Yeah, this letter is just proof of (the by now long standing fact) of corporate power/corporate capture of American governance. Tons of popular protests against big AI? Makes no difference. Joint corporate letter about big AI? Possibly the government will do something.
People unfortunately keep voting for “corporate power” politicians, so corporations continue to be in charge.
This is all a moot point because there's no way you can copyright a model because you can just randomly perturb weights and still be fine.
What does copyright have to do with anything? You also cannot copyright an encryption algorithm, but the US Government banned essentially mathematics for YEARS[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
You can randomly shift every pixel in a movie by +/-1, doesn't make the original not copyrightable.
We demand that possible all avenues to observe, replicate, and resell exogenous value remain uninhibited until ROI and monopoly is achieved!
At the end of the day, these companies that signed this letter have more cash. What they should do is bring some money together, more money than the other side, donate it and buy their way. That's the 2026 way, no one has time for all this letter and protest. How much are they willing to put on the line?
isn't the real world destroyer going to be when China starts cranking out it's own nvidia chip clones?
remember when bitcoin got its first dedicated hardware, will be like that
The issue is not open weights as a whole, indeed Hegseth himself said they are important for America (if American made, presumably); the issue is Chinese models, whether open or not, and that's what's looking to be banned, and nothing in this article suggests otherwise.
What is a "Chinese model"?
If I change one weight in Kimi, is it still a Chinese model?
If I fine-tune Kimi on pro-America nationalistic freedom loving anti-Chinese propaganda, is it still a Chinese model?
If I distill Kimi from one server to the next without ever directly transferring any weights, is it still a Chinese model?
If Claude accidentally trains on some of Kimi's output, is Claude then considered to be a Chinese model?
If China's next open-weight model is released secretly through a European company, is it still a Chinese model?
The conversation going on in the industry is a bit broader than that. OpenAI's head of strategic futures just said last week that open models are inherently decelerationist, ungovernable, and will slow development on the frontier. You'll notice OpenAI does not appear as a signatory here despite their relationship with Microsoft.
>open models are inherently decelerationist, ungovernable, and will slow development on the frontier
Ungovernable makes intuitive sense, but I don’t understand how open weight models could be decelerationist or slow the development of the frontier. Was there an argument for those positions?
Open weight models challenge the "winner takes all" hypothesis, which motivates the astronomical valuations and acts as a justification for trains of cash dumped into AI development.
In other words, if AI models become a commodity, the "AI leaders" will not be able to burn the cash like they do today, thus resulting in a "slower" (one could say instead "more sustainable") development of AI models.
Well maybe they should find better training methods or architectures
Tough shit welcome to capitalism
Here's his original post https://x.com/i/status/2078133895766114412
It's a copy/paste of the arguments against open source software from decades ago. The argument goes: innovation requires profit motive, and profit motive requires IP rights. Of course, this was soundly disproven in software and I don't see any reason it should be different here.
Chinese providers are actively debunking that argument by innovating on and releasing open weight models.
Surprised to see I partially agree. They are indeed ungovernable and that is the best part.
Well of course OpenAI and Anthropic say those sorts of things, it's what they've always said, particularly Anthropic, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's the position of the US government. In other words the government seems to be listening to some but not all of the lobbying done by the big two.
The guy who said those things just joined OpenAI in the last month. He was previously a senior policy advisor, specifically on AI, to the current administration in the White House.
I don't know that the US government has a unified position on open source AI. But it's not like this isn't a discussion happening among policymakers.
> ...the issue is Chinese models, whether open or not, and that's what's looking to be banned...
Is the US planning to invade China and take away their models? Because otherwise China is still going to have the models even if the US bans them. I don't think they're going to be going with the US position on this one.
It's the same patronizing nonsense as when all the US webcos pulled out of the Chinese market in some misguided supposed protest believing the Chinese so incapable of rolling their own Google, Amazon or WhatsApp they will come begging the americans to go back. Now the western tech universe goes to China for ideas.
If by "pulled out of the Chinese market" you mean "were hacked by the Chinese government in a way that compromised their intellectual property and the safety of dissidents", then yes [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora
The point is did the US reaction work or was it completely counter productive?
Then will attempting to cutoff China again today work or do we expect that also will prove to achieve the exact opposite of what its proponents are claiming?
Banned in the US, obviously, not worldwide. The problem is if the US wanted to, they actually could enforce such a ban nearly worldwide, by putting Chinese AI companies on a sanctions list and disallowing any US company (or anyone that does business with a US company, which is much of the world) from touching them.
Why anyone would care what Hegseth thinks about open weight models? What's wrong with Chinese models? The censorship? I think it's good to have diversity of opinion. Get US flavored output on sensitive subjects from US models and ZH on ZH models. That's a useful tool.
China is doing open models better. I think there's little going in Hagueseth's head other than the usual reactionary nationalism reflex.
I mean I agree with you, as what I said above is not my position, that's the US government's position.
> Open source did more than lower the cost of software; it created a shared foundation of knowledge on which generations of American engineers and entrepreneurs built their institutional sovereignty
Hey nvidia, what about making your full set of linux drivers open source?
I mean, I do agree that being open is important but you're hijacking the narrative here, and I suspect being open have nothing to do with any of this.
i'm glad someone else sees this too. There's nothing open source about an open-weight model. I feel like they're just trying to associate themselves with open source and the positive impacts it has had on software technolgoy.
Ok, great, so Microsoft believes in open weight models. So... uhh, why not release a few?
They did. Check out the Phi models (e.g., https://huggingface.co/microsoft/phi-4).
Great, how about some frontier models like China seems to be doing on a weekly basis at this point. Give us a CoPilot variant that's open source & open weights.
They could start by releasing the MAI-1 models they announced recently. https://microsoft.ai/models/
I don't personally have a horse in this race, but if you want to accurately predict the next step:
Start with the outcome you believe will be the most in line with the spirit and traditions of the open source community. This is precisely what won't happen.
It won't necessarily be the inverse. It could be, of course, but it's also likely to be a compromise between the two.
For a topical example: The companies doing "AI" layoffs aren't doing so out of a sense of having failed their staff that helped carry them so far. Often, these announcements come on the heels of record-breaking profits. They're doing it out of contempt for workers.
See https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/cory-doctoro... for Doctorow's take on centaurs vs. reverse centaurs. Broadly speaking: C-suite business leadership wants reverse centaurs. Workers want centaurs. Unless you have a union (or some other collective bargaining power structure that I'm not aware of), the C-suite calls the shots.
The same can be said of the current administration. They don't give a fuck what most of us want on any given issue. They're captured by an aggressive ideology. Their only incentive is to be able to spin their decision to make themselves look good; to posture as "strong" leadership.
Ideology? I think this administration is the least captured by ideology in the last few decades. It's mostly brazen self-interest, for both entertainment & profit.
It's a mix of grifts, gaffes, and Project 2025.
> Start with the outcome you believe will be the most in line with the spirit and traditions of the open source community
there's nothing open source about an open weight model. It's more like the binary blobs Linux fought so hard against. If you can't compile, or in this case train, from source then you're missing the "source" part of open source.
To be clear: This isn't a technical discussion, it's a political one.
While your point is valid on its own merits, it isn't relevant here.
Now that their lawyers have cornered everyone trying out open weight models and banned the ones they can, they put out a statement like this.
Some more discussion on NVIDIA crosspost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49035751
[flagged]
Ok, but please don't fulminate or post unsubstantive comments here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's not worthless, you don't have to agree with P on everything, or make it personal - it works as strictly business - only where and when appropriate.
I agree with the message, but I'm not going to accept it from this particular crowd.
Microsoft, NVIDIA, Meta, Palantir, IBM...They have all been actively hostile to open source for decades, and have a history of embracing it only when convenient and profitable.
Microsoft benefited from its close partnership with OpenAI for years right up until it went sour. Where was this enthusiasm for open weights then?
Meta was developing open models and then abandoned that effort in search for profits. Muse Spark is now fully closed.
All these companies have the resouces to train and release frontier open weights models today, but choose not to. So spare me the marketing and virtue signaling.
I’ll never forgive Microsoft for their hostile actions against open source and open standards in the 90s. I’ll never believe any endorsement from them of open-anything.
Yeah, the endorsement logos at the bottom are majority bad actors with regards to openness in code. Many are bad actors with regards to openness in _society_.
Yeah, never ask a fox to count your chickens.