As US weighs response to Chinese AI, industry urges against broad open-weight restrictions

Chinese AI, industry urges against broad open-weight restrictions">

Several AI companies, including Hugging Face, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral, and Nvidia, have signed an open letter urging policymakers not to impose broad “premature restrictions” on open-weight AI models. The letter comes as Washington debates how the U.S. should respond to allegations that Chinese AI labs are stealing intellectual property from their American counterparts, and growing in capability.

The letter doesn’t mention China at all, but it comes in the wake of reports that the Trump administration has been considering banning Chinese open-weight models, and potentially issuing sanctions against AI companies from the country. The White House has even accused Moonshot AI of distilling Anthropic’s Fable model to train its recently released and, by all measures, very impressive, Kimi K3 model.

The missive appears to be aimed at discouraging a total ban on Chinese models, as well as ensuring the administration’s response to alleged Chinese distillation doesn’t spill over into broader restrictions on open-weight AI or common techniques like distillation:

“Policymakers should be careful not to conflate legitimate model-development techniques with misappropriation. 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, a tradition that has helped drive innovation since the rise of the open-source software movement.

By contrast, unlawful efforts to extract value from closed models raise legitimate concerns. Those concerns should be addressed through targeted legal and commercial frameworks rather than sweeping restrictions on techniques that play an important role in AI innovation.”

Or as Amjad Masad, CEO of Replit (which also signed the letter) told TechCrunch: “I think banning Chinese open models is as good as banning open models in general.” He pointed out that Thinking Machine Labs’ new open model, Inkling , was trained with the help of Moonshot’s Kimi 2.5. “It’s an ecosystem, and the precedent [a ban would] set is bad.”

The letter also pushes back on arguments in the industry that open-weight models are inherently dangerous because they expand access to powerful models, which can be used in cyberattacks or other nefarious activities, without any oversight.

“The right response to this risk is not to prohibit open weights. In a world where cybersecurity attackers use advanced AI, defenders need access to models with comparable capabilities so they can detect, simulate, and respond to emerging threats,” the letter reads. “Open models broaden defensive capability, increase transparency, and allow vulnerabilities to be discovered and remediated across many teams.”