OpenAI joins open-weights letter, signatories reach 35
After conspicuously sitting out the industry's open-weights appeal to Washington, OpenAI has added its name, pushing the coalition to 35 organizations.
A reversal on open weights
OpenAI has signed the "Open Weights and American AI Leadership" letter, according to Chinese tech outlet IT之家, lifting the number of endorsing organizations to 35. The move is notable because when the letter was first published on July 24, OpenAI was among the closed-model leaders — alongside Anthropic and Google — that pointedly declined to sign, even as rivals Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, IBM, Dell, Palantir, Hugging Face, Mistral and Perplexity put their names to it.
The original coalition of roughly 25 companies and institutions — which also included a16z, Y Combinator, the Linux Foundation and Mozilla — urged the U.S. government to avoid "premature restrictions" on downloadable AI models. The appeal landed days after reports that the Trump administration was reviving a push to restrict Chinese open-weight models, a policy fight in which the letter's signatories argue that curbing open models would concentrate the technology in a few hands rather than broadening its benefits.
Why the timing matters
OpenAI's earlier silence had been widely read as self-interest: a company built on closed frontier models has less to lose if downloadable weights face regulatory headwinds. Its decision to sign — reported during the Asian trading day, a day after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang amplified the letter in what he said was his first-ever post on X — signals that the political center of gravity in Washington has shifted enough that even closed-model labs want to be on record defending an open ecosystem.
Why it matters
The letter is the clearest public marker yet of how U.S. industry is closing ranks against a potential ban on Chinese open models such as DeepSeek, Qwen and Kimi. For Asian labs whose global influence rests heavily on open releases — Chinese open-weight models reportedly crossed a majority share of global downloads earlier this year — the shape of U.S. import policy is existential. OpenAI's late endorsement removes one of the more conspicuous holdouts and strengthens the industry's argument that openness, not restriction, underpins American competitiveness. Anthropic and Google remain absent, a gap that will keep drawing scrutiny.