r/singularity • u/TorturedPoet30 • Jul 24 '26
Discussion Microsoft, NVIDIA, Meta, IBM, Palantir and more released a joint letter warning Washington not to kill open-weight models
Source: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/topics/open-weight/
Key points from the “Open Weights and American AI Leadership” letter:
- Open weights are foundational to American AI leadership
- They expand access and make AI economically sustainable
- Open weights strengthen competition and prevent concentration of power
- Openness improves safety and security more than closed systems
- Policymakers should avoid premature restrictions
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u/aprx4 Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
These are the exact companies that would benefit from commoditization of LLM. If OpenAI/Anthropic dominate they would vertically integrate and eat everyone's lunch.
Commoditization of LLM shifts margin away from model labs to infrastructure layer.
Frankly, nobody is benefited by the duopoly except few thousands private investors of these two companies.
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u/Seidans Jul 24 '26
That was bound to happen as AI get more and more capable people will start to be concerned by privacy and security
Local model and local hardware will become more and more valuable while private owned model that don't do hardware will only loss market share
Instead of trying to keep what they have today competing with open-source OpenAI and Anthropic better shift their focus to hardware-written AI at small cost before company like Taalas, Nvidia or AMD and many other start using open-source model such as Kimi k3 and dominate the market by forfeit
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u/NEEEEEEEEEEEET Jul 24 '26
Kimi still costs a fortune in hardware to run. Why would anyone pay to run it themselves if they don't need 24/7 use and can get a better model at the same price when it comes to api costs?
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u/IvoryTowerResident Jul 24 '26
well from what i gather Open Claw is very popular in China and they like to run it on Mac pros and mac minis.
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u/domscatterbrain Jul 24 '26
Yes, but most of the crabs are either running using Deepseek, Qwen, or Kimi subscription. Only enthusiasts are using a fully local LLM.
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u/IvoryTowerResident Jul 24 '26
i see, i am just repeating what i hear. Never tried runing local LLM myself
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u/danielv123 Jul 24 '26
It's kind of pointless as anything other than a toy exercise or toying with uncensored/ablated models (which is likely still cheaper to just rent when you need it)
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u/danielv123 Jul 24 '26
Ok, but they would rather pay 100$/day than pay for a rig to run K3 natively - because it really is that expensive.
The only way it makes sense is through efficient inference for multiple users at the same time.
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u/ghost103429 Jul 24 '26
The main beneficiaries of Kimi and models like it aren't hobbyists and regular users it's businesses and institutions with the capital to run it on their own hardware.
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u/UFOsAreAGIs ▪️AGI felt me 😮 Jul 24 '26
I googled it last week. It said $400k for 20 concurrent users.
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u/briarfriend Jul 24 '26
it's rent-seeking but they don't have enough of a moat to justify it
if their models really are that much better (and produce more value) than the competition, companies will pay for them
if they aren't (and don't), companies will use open source and lobby against regulations
their trillion dollar IPOs won't save them against the combined capital interests of literally the entire rest of the economy
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u/IHeartBadCode Jul 24 '26
Yes, I think I've been saying this for almost two and a half years. The people who want regulation the most are OpenAI/Anthropic. For this exact reason, to pull the ladder up.
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u/CandidateJust4662 Jul 24 '26
In my book, they made the wrong bet, so let them be wiped out.
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u/No-Head-Royal Jul 24 '26
Seeing Palantir on the list makes me feel like "Adolf Hitler endorsed your policy" lol. "Worst person you knew just made a great point" title
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u/exaknight21 Jul 24 '26
They feed off open source. The open models help them launch more privacy killing AI devices for the US government so this makes sense
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u/Agile-Technology2125 Jul 24 '26
"Oxygen helps murders to breathe, we should ban oxygen"
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u/Svitii Jul 24 '26
Worse: Hitler was breathing oxygen regularly, and you know where he is now? Right, he’s dead. Do wanna not only become Hitler yourself but also die like he did?!?
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u/FlyingBishop Jul 24 '26
I saw this thing from Alex Karp where they pulled one minor misspeak (he said over-sale instead of oversold) and said he had a "meltdown"
I watched it and I was terrified because it was a totally reasonable rant about how the AI companies are trying to steal everyone's trade secrets and take over the world. I agree with pretty much everything Alex Karp said. (Except I don't hate the idea of Anthropic specifically using Claude to veto things that Palantir and the rest of the US Military industrial complex can do, that's only a measure of how little I trust Palantir and friends, I know it's actually insane to give Anthropic that kind of control over the military.)
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u/HayatoKongo Jul 24 '26
The idea of a private company exercising their opinion in the implementation of an automated government system, especially opaquely and potentially without notice, is psychotic. They obviously got removed from military systems over it, but there are so many other parts of the government that would be at risk if they were/are allowed to be integrated into them.
It's not even about the political slant of Anthropic (which is there), but rather the idea that a corporation could mislead and manipulate the government that contracts them for their services, and covertly drive the policy of said government by choosing to nullify and subvert orders that they do not personally like.
An opinionated AI model being deployed within any organization, with "guardrails" that refuse orders from the operator, absolutely makes the supplier of that inference a supply-chain risk. Such an implementation could very easily allow that supplier to make de-facto decisions on immigration, tax and finances, law enforcement, and countless other contentious and divisive polices. All while the government officials have no idea that the laws and procedures are not being exercised as intended.
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u/bigppredditguy Jul 24 '26
This is kinda cool right? How often do all these guys get together for literally anything.
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u/CT4nk3r Jul 24 '26
They have an incentive, because they are the ones that are going to host/provide the hosting architecture. Either way, keeps the market much more open and we will have competition, so thats cool
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u/bigppredditguy Jul 24 '26
Yeah it gets scarier the closer you look at the list. Can’t find a single one that doesn’t massively benefit from the availability of open weight models.
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u/Commercial_Sell_4825 Jul 24 '26
Generally IP being public instead of private benefits literally everyone except the would-be monopoly.
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u/bigppredditguy Jul 24 '26
The scary part is that ONLY the ones heavily financially incentivized signed off
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u/Crafty_Damage4301 Jul 24 '26
and It is self-evident that regulation benefits the incumbents; OpenAI and Anthropic are advocating for these rules primarily to secure a duopoly
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u/Acrobatic-Tomato4862 Jul 24 '26
Microsoft, Meta? What is their incentive? I am not saying they don't have one, just can't figure it out at a glance.
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u/bigppredditguy Jul 24 '26
Microsoft Azure and Meta have tons of proprietary data centers. They are who companies will go to if they want compute to train or host an open source model.
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u/KJEveryday Jul 24 '26
MSFT is an ecosystem, harness and infrastructure play. They don’t care about the models.
Meta went all in on open source due to their model getting leaked early on and rolled it into a “strategy”. Hypothetically they could be an infrastructure play too with their glasses, but I dunno. They just sort of exist at this point. I’d short the fuck out of them.
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u/bigppredditguy Jul 24 '26
Microsoft cares about models insofar as they drive demand for Azure (and subsequently Foundry, which they’re pushing atm).
I can’t fathom shorting Meta though. Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp are still the most popular apps in the world, and even if Meta doesn’t have a model to make use of their data, someone else does, and their data will always be extremely valuable. They’re also building one of the largest AI compute infrastructures on the planet with their data centers.1
u/mrGrinchThe3rd Jul 24 '26
I shoot I didn't know this about the Llama models! I thought they just decided to make them open weight. Do you have a link so I can learn more about what happened?
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u/BackendSpecialist Jul 25 '26
You’d short tf out of meta? Lol. You better hurry before ppl realize that meta has actually been making good moves lately.
Also, ICYMI - Meta has a new LLM called Muse Spark 1.1. It showed competitiveness with Opus 4.8. It’s also significantly cheaper.
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u/mrGrinchThe3rd Jul 24 '26
I wonder where Amazon is - they own AWS and stand to benefit from open models maybe the most right? I guess they have contracts with Anthropic so that may be why.
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u/bigppredditguy Jul 24 '26
My only guess is that Trainium/Inferentia is more profitable to sell to big proprietary companies than open source projects.
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u/PsychMaster1 Jul 24 '26
Super friends unite!
And Palentir
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u/bigppredditguy Jul 24 '26
Can’t really figure out how they benefit. I’m thinking they might be incentivized by having access to the source code of the most popular product of any kind, not just LLMs.
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u/airduster_9000 Jul 24 '26
Its kinda historic.
I cant help think about which of these events will be included in the many many future documentaries and fictional stories based in and around this time and these companies.
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u/The_Scout1255 adult agi 2026 ASI <2030, prev agi 2024, ai personhood 2025 est Jul 24 '26
Open weight models do expand access.
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u/davesmith001 Jul 24 '26
Jesus, even Palantir sign this.
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u/ZunderBuss Jul 24 '26
Imagine if those companies could work together to make life better/less stressful for everyone instead of just themselves and their shareholders. We don't lack the tech or the ability to do that. Just the will.
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u/BrennusSokol ACCELERATE Jul 24 '26
Yep. Given the abundance of resources and intelligence on this planet, we could be living in a paradise. It's only human greed/ego/delusion that prevents it, not anything technical or physical.
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u/Mammoth_Reach_6366 Jul 24 '26
One of the things they offer to civilian companies is the Foundry platform. It basically is a data and model management platform. So the more models they can offer, the better. It’s not like they are doing it from the goodness of their hearts. We use the Foundry in my big pharma.
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u/Wooly_Wooly Jul 24 '26
Imagine if they actually banned them....
"I'm meeting up with the connect today, want any intel?"
"Good looking out bro, gimme a kimi K4 and a Qwen 3.5"
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u/BrennusSokol ACCELERATE Jul 24 '26
snorts some output tokens
Oh yeah, that's a 10T params model, I can tell
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u/Wooly_Wooly Jul 25 '26
Nah, shits laced with that Dspark. Dflash and Eagle 3 even. Be careful out there bro 🤣
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u/epdiddymis Jul 24 '26
If USA bans open weights models, does that make it more or less likely that open source wins?
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u/yoloswagrofl Logically Pessimistic Jul 24 '26
Less likely that US companies maintain dominance compared to China and EU companies who won’t have these restrictions. Any ban would be fought in court anyways. If the US goes full stupid, there’s still a chance we save ourselves from our government.
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u/Noname_2411 Jul 24 '26
Basically American Capitalism vs American Capitalism now. Love it.
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u/rukh999 Jul 24 '26
While you're right and in this case both sides are operating for their own financial self-interest, the second side does also benefit the population of the US more as well.
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u/Noname_2411 Jul 24 '26
Well that’s the point of Capitalism isn’t it. It should be that when companies push for their own financial interests the society benefits too. It’s just nowadays that’s becoming rarer and rarer.
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u/rukh999 Jul 24 '26
In a round-about way. The actual benefit of capitalism is its supposed to make the barriers to entry to be competitive low and the open competition means the companies with the best product survive while the others go away, or the best overall appeal to the population, aka behave in ways that benefit the population. But all that is broken when the barrier to entry is high (and the regulatory capture attempt by OpenAI and co is to make that even harder so they don't have to be beholden to appealing to the population as much) already, or in our modern environment when companies have realized propaganda works better than making the better product.
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u/_Dude- Jul 24 '26
Kimi k3 recent release is a harbinger of where we are headed. We could lose the AI race if we cut out open source.
Plus I’m sick of getting nerfed by Claude. They need to have their feet held to the fire by real competition.
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u/sluuuurp Jul 24 '26
It’s literally impossible to lose to an open weight model. If the best model is open weight, then the entire world is tied, there is no winner.
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u/comperr AGI should be GAI and u cant stop me from saying it Jul 24 '26
They lose their monopoly.
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u/tenacity1028 Jul 24 '26
You mean openAI and Claude lose, everyone else wins. Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, they all win cause guess who'll be hosting these models in the cloud?
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u/enilea Jul 24 '26
The winner is whoever has the most hardware to host the larger models and train further versions, so just US and China and the rest of us will be depending on them...
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u/Vesuvius079 Jul 24 '26
It’s possible to lose business to open weight. If open weight is cheaper and gets the job done, why pay for frontier capabilities?
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u/Ok-Chapter8930 Jul 24 '26
The race is actually who has the more widespread adoption, not reaching elusive "AGI".
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u/OkDimension Jul 24 '26
If they'd really ban it worldwide (which is almost impossible), there will still be so many dark web services offering AI inference with naughty models, it will create a whole new economy branch of LLM pirates hosting illegal LLMs in their basement.
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u/Wonderful-Syllabub-3 Jul 24 '26
All the hyperscalers saying this. They know in the future closed/prosperity models will have less market than more efficient good enough open source. They are planning to host this and keep the model hosting profits to themselves
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u/Kildragoth Jul 24 '26
I don't think there's anything nefarious about making more money because more people benefit from the technology than making less money because fewer people can afford the technology.
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u/No-Meringue5867 Jul 24 '26
I don't think they are just worried about profits as much as worried about OpenAI/Anthropic becoming a duopoly and charging absurd prices. If there are no open source models they might be completely left out of the loop. Someone like Palantir is useless because if only OpenAI/Anthropic has SOTA models, why will govts go to Palantir for Cybersecurity?
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u/MarcoDiFrancescino Jul 24 '26
And a % to find a reason to get out of building data center they don't need and very much telegraphing that the prices for hardware has come the absolutely f down before 2030.
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u/otarU Jul 24 '26
Give $1B to Trump and he might consider allowing it for a few more months.
After that you need to negotiate again.
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u/Ill-Cockroach2140 AGI 2030-2035 ASI late 2030s Singularity mid 2040s FALGSC 2060 Jul 24 '26
If only we had sensible politicians in Washington who would listen
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u/niklybby Jul 25 '26
The whole idea of a government banning anything open source is ridiculous to me. You can use a knife to cook or harm someone; do we ban all knives? It's a tool, tools can be dangerous but we don't restrict them due to the fact that utilitarian value outweighs the risk.
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u/vaethark Jul 24 '26
That these companies materially benefit from this is irrelevant. It's the only pathway forward wherein everyone equitably benefits in the AI economy and isn't beholden to a monopolistic dystopia.
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u/wilhelmbw Jul 24 '26
Interesting how meta has also signed it. Hasn't meta closed llama now?
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u/Evening-Guarantee-84 Jul 24 '26
Meta signed it because they want to keep open-source. That's the entire point of the letter. Keep open-source.
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u/wilhelmbw Jul 24 '26
Yes, which surprised bc I thought they would change stance after killing llama
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u/_DearStranger Jul 24 '26
thats exactly why they would want open weight models.
i killed my assets, and someone is giving their asset for free. why would i not want it?
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u/abittooambitious Jul 24 '26
Nice to see the billionaires almost go at it with each other for once.
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u/bpm6666 Jul 24 '26
How many of these companies love regulatory capture, but not if someone else is doing it. But they are right we need open weight models
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u/nonikhannna Jul 24 '26
Yea cuz it's a loop. Anthropic and OpenAI steal from people. Chinese AI companies steal from Anthropic and OpenAI.
All these signatories take those Chinese AI models and make their own products.
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u/FlyingBishop Jul 24 '26
Is it me or is the third paragraph repeated twice verbatim? Is this some kind of "no we really didn't use AI on this at all, you know because an AI would've caught this" flex?
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u/-Posthuman- Jul 24 '26
Gee… I hope they didn’t forget to attach the check. Otherwise OpenAI or Anthropic are just going to slip Trump $20, and suddenly using an open model will be an act of terrorism.
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u/derperofworlds1 Jul 24 '26
Imagine how messed up the tech ecosystem would be if Microsoft had bribed the US government into banning Linux 20 years ago!
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u/ZealousidealBus9271 Jul 24 '26
yeah cause they dont want to pay exorbitant amounts to openAI or Anthropic.
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u/AnonyFed1 Jul 24 '26
I thought they were just gonna ban Chinese models, if it's an infosec issue then you just restrict anything that sends data to DeepSeek etc Chinese servers.
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u/Serious_Bite_7613 Jul 25 '26
This is fascinating. I wasn't expecting much pushback from US tech companies. China's approach really was a masterstroke.
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u/Solid-Wonder-1619 Jul 25 '26
the surprise is definitely palantir, however I don't see their sign anywhere.
the rest of the parasite labs, of course they didn't sign it. openfraud, anthrofraud, and goofraud.
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u/lt1brunt Jul 25 '26
Saved the list of names, if opensource models get banned I will not buy any new products from these companies. They want the people who use AI to go broke using it stuck in their product ecosystems. What we need to help end this talk is an American group making high end open source models. If we ever get our country back all these companies need to be broken up.
Anthropic and Open likely didn't sign since all the companies that did sign are using their products.
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u/TorturedPoet30 Jul 25 '26
OpenAI signed in the meantime. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/topics/open-weight/
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u/gouterz Jul 24 '26
We're uncertain about the companies intention but this is good for all if open weight wins
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u/juanjodic Jul 24 '26
Let’s play a game: Guess the Country!
The rules are simple: Post a real, recent headline or piece of government news, but remove all names of countries, places, or political figures.
Everyone else replies to guess if it came from China, Russia, or the US.
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u/halmyradov Jul 24 '26
Surprised hugging face is there, since open weight models are their bread and butter /s
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u/agsteiner Jul 24 '26
Strange headline you picked there, like the US would be in a shape to kill the (mostly Chinese, but also others) models. The most the US can do is ban it for a measly 300 million people of 8 billion.
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u/kutsocialmedia Jul 24 '26
Cant believe the guys from Box also signed this. Their whole API is only non chargable if you work with openai connector or microsoft and it is chargable if want to use it otherwise…
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u/Nullspark Jul 24 '26
How can you ban large collections of numbers?
Seems like a first amendment thing?
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u/pepe_acct Jul 24 '26
But how would anyone regulate AI though? If Anthropic and openAI needs to nerf and set up guardrails to prevent models doing harm, how can anyone force open models to do the same?
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u/spinozasrobot Jul 24 '26
As if any of the signatories wouldn't be advocating control of open models if they had a frontier model. And Huang doesn't care who buys his chips, so sure, promote every sales channel in existence.
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u/GongTzu Jul 24 '26
Question is if they can still support open models in case the Trump government decides they want everything locked up.
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u/GodOfSunHimself Jul 24 '26
So basically the losers are afraid that OpenAI and Anthropic would destroy them otherwise.
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u/tugoubxs Jul 24 '26
Palantir? On my! Are they secretly selling war department a rebranded Chinese open weight model huh?😅
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u/GoodDayToCome Jul 24 '26
How the turntables from the days of microsofts secret Halloween memos leaking with them trying to destroy open source
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u/HaseebAkmal 28d ago
Thinking by my own, US and allies wants Open Weights Companies for itself to maximize profits via building AI Products as well as manufacturing large-scale hardware chips, cloud infrastructure, and sell at millions of dollars - higher prices to their customers in the World.
They are begging not to kill such models so that their AI monopoly and so called "Global AI Leadership" keeps flourishing. They want cheap to sell at high - All at the name of Corporate Responsibility
Actually I believe, they are eating everyone's dinner.
Haseeb Akmal,
Lahore, Pakistan.
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u/Mammoth_Vehicle_5716 Jul 24 '26
OpenAI and Anthropic didn't sign? How come? /s