Jensen Huang joined X just to argue America cannot afford to close AI
Nvidia's CEO used his first-ever X post to publish an open letter backing open-weight AI models, signed by 25 companies. OpenAI and Anthropic did not sign.
There is something funny about going years without posting a single line on social media and then debuting with a policy paper. That is what Jensen Huang did on Thursday: the Nvidia chief executive’s first-ever post on X was not an office photo or a note to shareholders — it was a document titled Open Weights and American AI Leadership.
What does the open-weights letter actually say?
That the United States needs both things at once. Huang argues the country should nurture frontier proprietary models and open-weight models side by side rather than concentrating everything in closed systems, on the grounds that the mix is what maximises innovation, competition and resilience. The letter’s central claim is that restricting open-weight AI would weaken American leadership and slow innovation rather than improve national security — the exact inverse of the argument usually made for limiting it.
Underneath sits a concrete anxiety nobody spelled out: the strongest open-weight models around right now are not all American. When Chinese labs ship open weights and the West ships APIs, the thing developers everywhere build on is the thing they can download.
Who signed, and who stayed away?
Roughly 25 companies signed, among them Dell, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, Mozilla, Perplexity, Palantir and Hugging Face. That is a heavy list. The absences are more telling: neither OpenAI nor Anthropic — the two labs whose frontier models sit squarely on the closed side of this argument — put their name to it.
For Nvidia, it should be said, this is not intellectual charity. The more people who train and run models themselves, the more chips get sold; a world of half a dozen closed labs buys less silicon than a world of thousands of teams fine-tuning open weights. An argument can be both correct and self-serving.
The debate is not only American either. We have already watched Japan pull 44 companies into a sovereign AI consortium for similar reasons, and Europe is doing the same arithmetic. The underlying question never changes: if the next decade of software rests on a handful of models, somebody had better be able to open the box. The company’s own technical positions live on Nvidia’s official site.
By Oliver Grant
Image: Maurizio Pesce / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
