By Jonathan Vanian
Publication Date: 2026-08-12 12:00:00
(L to R) Jensen Huang, President and CEO of Nvidia Corporation, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, arrive for a U.S. Senate bipartisan Artificial Intelligence Insight Forum at the US Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 13, 2023.
Andrew Caballero-reynolds | Afp | Getty Images
Last month, American tech giants came together to urge policymakers not to place “premature restrictions” on open-weight AI models, even if they’re from China. Now, two of those companies are making a concerted effort to compete by introducing their own open offerings.
Meta and Nvidia both released artificial intelligence models this week that are available for developers to download for free via the open-source ecosystem, a contrast to the popular proprietary models from OpenAI and Anthropic.
Open-source AI has become a contentious topic from Silicon Valley to Washington, D.C., with critics raising concerns about the potential national security risks of Chinese models, and of the AI training practice called distillation, which can be viewed as a form of intellectual property theft. Meanwhile, most of the industry’s leading players contend that restricting use of the models would be to our own detriment and would place too much power in the hands of too few companies.
“The age of AI can be one of prosperity,” the consortium of tech companies wrote in an open letter on July 24. “With the right choices, open weight AI can expand opportunity, strengthen competition, extend…
