Jensen Huang goes to bat for open-weight AI, Musk cheers

Jensen Huang broke his X silence for a cause: open-weight AI. Nvidia's CEO made his first-ever post on the platform to promote a joint letter, "Open Weights and American AI Leadership," signed by 25 organizations — Meta, Microsoft, IBM, Dell, Mistral, Hugging Face, the Linux Foundation, Perplexity, and Y Combinator among them. Notably absent: OpenAI and Anthropic.

The pitch to Washington: locking down open weights won't boost national security, it'll just slow U.S. innovation and hand ground to rivals. The letter draws a straight line to the 1980s open-source movement that built much of today's internet backbone. Huang has separately called fears of Chinese-model backdoors "a misconception" and argued excellent open models — Kimi, DeepSeek — should be used, not banned.

Where's Musk? He's been amplifying Huang's optimism — recently reposting a Huang interview clip with a one-word "True" — though that's a nod to Huang's AI-and-jobs worldview, not a signed endorsement of the manifesto itself. Convenient for Nvidia either way: more models running, open or closed, means more demand for its chips.

Why it matters: the biggest names in compute are lobbying to keep AI's weights open — and framing it as an American competitiveness issue, not a safety risk.