Risky Business · Wednesday, July 29, 2026
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has penned an open letter defending the importance of open-weight AI models to the ecosystem. The letter argues that techniques like distillation are crucial for AI innovation and should not be conflated with misuse, urging policymakers to avoid sweeping restrictions.
“It really did look like the knives were coming out for open weight models, uh, both among US policymakers and Chinese policymakers.”
“Basically, every technology firm under the sun has signed on to that letter, with one big exception, which is Anthropic, which has responded, uh, I think just yesterday, with its own letter, which is decidedly less enthusiastic about open weights models, and we'll get to that in a second.”
“In shaping this ecosystem, policy makers should be careful not to conflate legitimate model development techniques with misappropriation. Distillation, or the practice of using one model's outputs to help train or improve another, is a widely used technique for model improvement, evaluation, and validation.”