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.

Both the CEO of Palantir and the CEO of Microsoft have recently criticized very strongly the business model of OpenAI and Anthropic.

Therefore it is no surprise that both companies are among the signatories.

The motivation of Palantir is very transparent, they have launched a product created in cooperation with NVIDIA, which is a turnkey system (Sovereign AI) that includes all hardware (i.e. a rack with servers full of NVIDIA GPUs) and all software needed by a company to run on its premises LLM inference and also training/fine tuning.

Thus the Palantir product competes with OpenAI and Anthropic and it benefits from the existence of open weights LLMs.

The motivation of Microsoft is more obscure for now, but because its criticism was very similar to that of Palantir, about how dangerous it is for corporations to delegate the processing of their AI needs to external entities like OpenAI and Anthropic, I assume that Microsoft is also going to propose an alternative to using remotely the OpenAI and Anthropic APIs.

Unlike Palantir, Microsoft is not likely to suggest self-hosting on premises, but I suppose that they might promote self-hosting on some kind of instances rented from Azure.

Commoditization of the model layer is to Azure's benefit. It would help to avoid the model layer becoming a platform that commoditizes cloud into a pure bare metal business. It also redistributes 'consumer' surplus back to the end user via a lower effective price, which would conceivably increase demand for IaaS and/or PaaS which are complements.

My hunch is they are all seeing the problems at OpenAI and some other collateral damage on the horizon. They don’t want the US government intervening to try to save OpenAI. A little controlled burn is probably good for the industry long term.

> But the letter is really about _American_ open weights models.

AI models don’t really have nationality. They don’t have race/ethnicity fields on their model cards. It’s impossible to determine the country of origin of a model by looking at their weights. There is no DNA test for AIs. They exist in a mathematical space where human-made borders make no sense.

This means IF there is a regulation for open weight models, it has to apply to ALL open weight models. There is no any other option, since you can always train/fine-tune a model to change it’s weights and rebrand it as a new model.

Signatories appear to group into

(a) sellers of hardware (Nvidia, IBM) and those who rent hardware out to others (Amazon, Microsoft)

They want open models because they don't have to license it to run it on their hardware, so they can offer lower cost and inspect what they are offering to clients

(b) open model creators (Arcee, Perplexity, Mistral, IBM, Microsoft)

...who would be unable to work if open-weight models are banned

(c) Software-heavy companies ( Mozilla, The Linux Foundation , ServiceNow, Microsoft, IBM, heck all of them)

...who want models that are cheap to run because that reduces the cost of running an LLM (whether you are trying to replace a software developer or just assist them, the value of a reduced cost LLM is directionally the same)

> Microsoft is somewhat unexpected to me

MS is playing literally all the sides in this whole AI thing. They are a massive investor in oAI, and have lots of rights to use their models for a long time. They also have the cloud where they offer inference w/ all the benefits of already being there, data retention, etc. They also have a research wing that can build models (rumours are they're aiming for frontier-ish). I don't think there's currently an angle in this AI thing that MS hasn't aimed for.

> 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.

OpenAI and Anthropic can bring American open-weight model providers like Meta to court but not the Chinese. Chinese companies breaking American IP law (whether the law is correct or not) are basically immune. This has been going on forever, I guess enough is at stake finally for the federal government to care.

Google and Amazon both have incredibly large compute deals with frontier labs and GovCloud. They may not want to sour on that cash.

It helps to understand there are multiple factions within the white house and trump admin. One faction is very hawkish towards allies and enemies, especially China. Another is the one sending ICE to invade American cities, the Christian nationalism and such. Another is very focused on wealth expansion for friends and family. There is an amount of Venn to these groups.