Some irony: I subscribe to Claude and Codex (20x plans), and now Kimi.

Why Kimi? because K3 is the only frontier model I can have a serious conversation with about my product's security.

(I did apply for OpenAi's Cyber Pilot but got no response)

I posted earlier on reddit that at this point, the closed source lobby wanting to ban open weights is effectively outgunned (musk also publicly supported this).

The oddly reminds me of back in the day when SOPA had caused a similar stir (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act), and all HN was up in arms against it.

From yesterday:

Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49023016 - July 2026 (841 comments)

Also related:

OpenAI and Anthropic unite against open-weight AI risks to their bottom line - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49020868 - July 2026 (330 comments)

China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48979269 - July 2026 (932 comments)

The gap between open weights LLMs and closed source LLMs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48692058 - June 2026 (250 comments)

The unbearable cheapness of open weight models - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48668255 - June 2026 (186 comments)

I wonder what is happening behind closed doors for these companies to be issuing such a joint letter.

It would be interesting to know how many optimizations of the Chinese models were incorporated back into Claude and Codex.

Just saw on Microsoft

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/top...

The list of companies that signed this letter is telling (including Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft). Equally telling is the list of companies that did not sign it -- including Google, Amazon.

If you see the long 3rd paragraph twice, know that you are not alone.

MSFT, dell, NVIDIA. These guys will make money no matter who uses what AI since they're the hardware providers. Even though they all own stake in frontier labs, chinese open weight models will commoditize the intelligence layer.

Reassuring to see this backed by major players.

This is the correct stance, hopefully this is the stance that prevails.

Hopefully something good comes from this... But I certainly don't see the big players caving in: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47929951>

The Chinese open models are way ahead, not by how capable they are compared to frontier models, but on how they project to the world and how they improve over time.

Ultimately the market will balance demand and supply. From a strategic perspective big players want to get to a level playing field as soon as possible as then their market reach and capital wins the game. Pesky nimble small closed upstarts are in the best case a costly distraction and in the worst case a threat - Antropic and Openai did not sign the letter.

Predictable power play by corporate strategy and legal departments.

Would be nice to see standardized open weight classes: 12B, 24B, 48B… Who can make the best open model in each weight class.

I don't feel it's meaningful to berate the point anymore about the hypocrisy of the American labs. Now as the sentiment and effort from them to push for regulation increases so does my perception of how pathetic they are behaving. I'm not sure how else to say it other than that it's honestly just embarrassing to watch China and others run circles around us in the USA.

This is all a moot point because there's no way you can copyright a model because you can just randomly perturb weights and still be fine.

It makes a ton of sense to see this sort of joint effort being made by these enormous companies, but man, there's some part of me that can't help but feel grossed out knowing the best way to get the US to make the right choice is to have a handful of elite business people say it'd be bad for them.

I wonder why Apple stayed absent from signing this?

Wait.. If "distillation" produces better results than the "original" models, why don't the US model owners do it to themselves?

Have ChatGPT 5.6 talk to itself to produce 5.7 or whatever?

And since they already know which requests came from China or looked like distillation, can't they just replay those same prompts?

You can’t train on our models trained on human text, that is stealing the IP we stole first!

I thought it would've made a lot of sense for Apple to be on this list as well.

I'm finding the list of signatories on this letter really interesting and somewhat confusing, looking purely through the lens of economic interest.

It makes sense to see Meta, the startups, and the VC firms on this list. And it makes sense to see OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google all missing. Microsoft is somewhat unexpected to me. I don't think of them as having a focus on open weight models (no more than Google), and they have a large stake in OpenAI. Maybe they're looking at this from the angle of Azure providing compute. But then why is Amazon missing, when it has AWS?

And of course, we don't see DeepSeek, Moonshot, or Z.ai on here. The letter is about American technological leadership after all. But then we _do_ see the French company Mistral! Mistral who released [a playbook](https://europe.mistral.ai/) for Europe becoming a self-reliant AI powerhouse.

I assume all of this is in the context of influencing the Trump administration's thinking on Chinese open weights models. But the letter is really about _American_ open weights models. The call to action is all about keeping the American open weights ecosystem competitive. I didn't even realize that was under threat, so I feel like I'm missing something.

So the people lagging in the commercial model game are issuing this warning? Got it.

At the end of the day, these companies that signed this letter have more cash. What they should do is bring some money together, more money than the other side, donate it and buy their way. That's the 2026 way, no one has time for all this letter and protest. How much are they willing to put on the line?

isn't the real world destroyer going to be when China starts cranking out it's own nvidia chip clones?

remember when bitcoin got its first dedicated hardware, will be like that

Companies that are hurt by open weight models fight against them. Companies that benefit from open weight models fight overregulation. Color me surprised.

> The unbearable cheapness of open weight models

So the closed model try to get client with their model by saying it's cheaper than employees, and then turn around to lawyer-out cheaper alternative?

Truly the american dream.

The issue is not open weights as a whole, indeed Hegseth himself said they are important for America (if American made, presumably); the issue is Chinese models, whether open or not, and that's what's looking to be banned, and nothing in this article suggests otherwise.

We demand that possible all avenues to observe, replicate, and resell exogenous value remain uninhibited until ROI and monopoly is achieved!

I don't personally have a horse in this race, but if you want to accurately predict the next step:

Start with the outcome you believe will be the most in line with the spirit and traditions of the open source community. This is precisely what won't happen.

It won't necessarily be the inverse. It could be, of course, but it's also likely to be a compromise between the two.

For a topical example: The companies doing "AI" layoffs aren't doing so out of a sense of having failed their staff that helped carry them so far. Often, these announcements come on the heels of record-breaking profits. They're doing it out of contempt for workers.

See https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/cory-doctoro... for Doctorow's take on centaurs vs. reverse centaurs. Broadly speaking: C-suite business leadership wants reverse centaurs. Workers want centaurs. Unless you have a union (or some other collective bargaining power structure that I'm not aware of), the C-suite calls the shots.

The same can be said of the current administration. They don't give a fuck what most of us want on any given issue. They're captured by an aggressive ideology. Their only incentive is to be able to spin their decision to make themselves look good; to posture as "strong" leadership.

> Open source did more than lower the cost of software; it created a shared foundation of knowledge on which generations of American engineers and entrepreneurs built their institutional sovereignty

Hey nvidia, what about making your full set of linux drivers open source?

I mean, I do agree that being open is important but you're hijacking the narrative here, and I suspect being open have nothing to do with any of this.

Ok, great, so Microsoft believes in open weight models. So... uhh, why not release a few?

Now that their lawyers have cornered everyone trying out open weight models and banned the ones they can, they put out a statement like this.

[dead]

"the companies with the most to lose saw which way the wind was blowing and switched sides" mightve been an apt title.

Some more discussion on NVIDIA crosspost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49035751

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I agree with the message, but I'm not going to accept it from this particular crowd.

Microsoft, NVIDIA, Meta, Palantir, IBM...They have all been actively hostile to open source for decades, and have a history of embracing it only when convenient and profitable.

Microsoft benefited from its close partnership with OpenAI for years right up until it went sour. Where was this enthusiasm for open weights then?

Meta was developing open models and then abandoned that effort in search for profits. Muse Spark is now fully closed.

All these companies have the resouces to train and release frontier open weights models today, but choose not to. So spare me the marketing and virtue signaling.