Foreign Affairs

Big Tech, Defense Giants Lock Arms To Warn Reigning In US AI Would Embolden Foreign Rivals

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Tech and defense contractors warned Washington that cracking down on some AI models would send the technology abroad.

Nvidia, Palantir, and 23 other companies signed a letter Friday opposing new limits on open-weight AI models anyone can download and run themselves. As the Trump administration weighs restrictions on these models, the signers of the letter argued that over-regulation of open models may “drive innovation overseas,” according to the letter.

OpenAI and Anthropic were notably absent from the letter. Both have expressed concern over open models, according to Axios.

Nvidia, Palantir, the White House, OpenAI and Anthropic each did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.

“[O]penness may be one of the most important paths to AI safety and security. Relying solely on closed models is not inherently safe: they can be breached, misused, or fail in ways that outsiders cannot detect,” the tech coalition letter read in part. “[C]oncentrating advanced AI capabilities behind a small number of closed models compounds that risk.”

“Open weight models, on the other hand, allow a broad community of researchers and developers to examine their behavior, identify vulnerabilities, develop safeguards, and improve them over time,” the tech firms said in the letter, arguing that more people may need access to the AI models “on which society relies” to properly probe them and fix weak spots. 

Nvidia and the coalition of tech signatories, however, defended distillation methods to train new models, according to the letter.

“Distillation, or the practice of using one model’s outputs to help train or improve another, is a widely used technique for model improvement, evaluation, and validation. It reflects a long tradition of learning from, building upon, and improving existing technologies,” the letter said.

The While House accused the Beijing-based Moonshot AI of distilling Anthropic’s Fable to train Kimi K3 on Wednesday.

“Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a Friday post to X, explaining why Nvidia believes open models of AI are so important. “The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models.”

“You don’t need to ‘ban open source’ … You just need to direct every agency to issue soft law that creates FUD. ‘A Federal Reserve Advisory Bulletin found that there may be backdoors in Chinese AI models,’” Dean Ball, head of strategic futures for OpenAI, wrote in a July 16 X post. “It needn’t be that well justified. You just create enough regulatory risk that every regulated enterprise backs off.”