Nvidia and Palantir urge US not to ban ‘open’ AI models after China scare

Leading tech groups including Nvidia, Palantir, Microsoft and Meta have urged the US not to restrict “open-weight” AI models, as Washington threatens to target Chinese labs over fears of intellectual property theft.

Open models, which users can customise and run on their own hardware, are popular among Chinese AI developers who have recently announced technical advances against US rivals whose top-tier models are closed.

The open letter on Friday, which argued policymakers should keep “the [AI] frontier plural by avoiding premature restrictions on open models”, was not joined by OpenAI, Anthropic or Google — the three leading makers of closed AI models.

The public plea comes amid an intensifying fight over the fate of open-weight models. Calls for a ban on Chinese AI models have grown louder this month after the release of Kimi K3 by Beijing-based Moonshot AI, whose capabilities stoked concerns about China edging ahead in an AI arms race both countries regard as critical to national security and prosperity.

Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, this week said the US “has information” that Moonshot used a process called distillation — which involves training a less powerful model using the outputs from a stronger one — to develop its technology from Anthropic’s latest Fable model.

“Large-scale, covert industrial distillation aimed at stealing proprietary US technology and undermining American research is unacceptable,” he said.

In response to Kratsios’s claim, Anthropic said “industrial espionage... creates serious national security risks for the United States and democratic allies”.

US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent fuelled speculation about a ban on Chinese models, saying that “when PRC firms conduct covert, industrial-scale distillation attacks that cross the line into IP theft, sanctions... will be on the table”.

But he added that the Trump administration supports open-weight AI.

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