Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia and 20+ firms back open-weight AI in open letter

More than 20 companies including Microsoft, Meta, and Nvidia signed an open letter advocating for open-weight AI models, as Washington debates restrictions in response to Chinese AI competition. Microsoft is also shifting some of its own products, like Copilot, from external models to its in-house MAI family.

Why it matters: Cloud providers like Microsoft benefit commercially from open-weight models since they reduce dependence on paying OpenAI or Anthropic for inference, even when in-house models underperform on benchmarks. The letter also signals industry pushback against potential US restrictions on open-weight AI following the Moonshot distillation controversy.