US Tech Companies Call for Open AI Models to Counter China

Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 has jolted the US technology industry, prompting companies to step up calls for Washington to promote open-weight AI models and ease restrictions. A growing number of technology companies have backed an open letter from Microsoft urging the US government to ease restrictions on open models and actively promote their development. Meta, which had been shifting toward paid models after Llama, has released its open model Muse Glimmer with 30 billion parameters, designed for consumer PCs and laptops. Nvidia, consistently advocating for open models, has unveiled Nemotron 3.5 Lightning (30B parameters, MoE model) and is reportedly developing Nemotron 4, potentially the first US open model with 1 trillion parameters. Meta’s Muse Glimmer is derived from Muse Spark, offering reasoning, agentic capabilities, multimodal functions, and coding. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has committed to releasing Muse Spark 1.2 weights, reaffirming Meta’s stance on open models. Nvidia’s Nemotron 3.5 Lightning follows Muse Glimmer’s release, with 30B parameters and 3B activated parameters. Reports indicate Nvidia is preparing Nemotron 4, aiming to challenge leading open-source models with a 1 trillion-parameter model. The US IT publication The Information notes Nvidia’s development plans, though details remain unverified. Chinese open models like Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 (2.8 trillion parameters) and DeepSeek’s V4-Pro (1.6 trillion) have narrowed the performance gap with US models, raising concerns about AI research shifting to China. US tech companies argue banning open models is not a solution, fearing a loss of innovation and research collaboration. A study found that 44% of scientific papers in 2026 used open-weight models, driven by Chinese models. TechCrunch reports that US graduate programs increasingly rely on Chinese models, with research influenced by Chinese institutions. Andy Konwinski and Clem Delangue argue that the US must adopt open-source policies to maintain leadership in AI. Microsoft’s open letter, signed by over 270 companies, advocates for US government support for open models to address cyber threats and foster innovation.