Global technology, cybersecurity and artificial intelligence firms are stepping up their push for the U.S. government to embrace open AI systems, touting their security benefits and warning against efforts to block them amid an AI arms race with China.
The first salvo came on Friday, when a coalition of 76 companies issued an open letter extolling the virtues of open-weight AI models. The second came on Monday, when 37 companies — including some of the open letter’s signatories — launched the Open Secure AI Alliance to advance a similar mission.
Both efforts come as Silicon Valley and Washington are scrambling to respond to the increasing power of Chinese open-weight AI systems, which in just the past few weeks have significantly closed the AI sophistication gap between China and the U.S.
While major American AI firms remain wary of China’s recent advances, the new public-relations campaign for open-weight models suggests that they are more concerned with the consequences of relying on closed-source systems for everything from drug discovery to vulnerability detection.
Staying open to open weights
“Our AI leadership will be judged not by one frontier AI model, but by whether the United States builds a strong, open ecosystem that diffuses into every sector,” the open letter reads. “This is essential for creating opportunities for innovation and prosperity across the country.”
Open weights make it easier for new firms to enter the AI industry, expanding the kind of competition that strengthens the economy, the letter said. Open weights also give customers greater control, according to the letter, by giving them the freedom to move easily between AI providers.
And while open weights pose “real and distinct risks,” because anyone can modify the AI models after their release, creating a sprawl of potentially malicious variants, they also “broaden defensive capability, increase transparency, and allow vulnerabilities to be discovered and remediated across many teams,” the letter’s signatories wrote.
The companies called open-weight AI models “one of the most important paths to AI safety and security.” They noted that closed-source models can be hacked or abused in hard-to-detect ways, and they argued that concentrating the U.S.’s advanced AI marketplace in the hands of a few large closed-source model providers “compounds that risk.”
The letter’s signatories are some of the most powerful actors in the tech world, including venture firms such as Andreessen Horowitz; tech giants such as Cisco, Google and Microsoft; and OpenAI.
Focus on security benefits
The Open Secure AI Alliance emphasized cybersecurity even more prominently in its launch announcement.
“Just as open source created a shared foundation for software,” the group’s founders said, “the United States and its partners now face a choice in AI security: whether the defenses that protect our infrastructure will sit inside a few opaque systems or be built on open models, harnesses and tools that any defender can study, adapt and deploy.”
The alliance noted that a Chinese open-source model, GLM 5.2, proved essential to cyber defense when two OpenAI models autonomously hacked the AI library Hugging Face and the library’s operators needed to analyze the situation. Closed-source AI models refused to analyze the threat data that Hugging Face inputted, assuming it was trying to launch an attack of its own. Only GLM 5.2, which Hugging Face was able to run on its own servers, answered the company’s questions and provided the defensive recommendations it needed.
Hugging Face was one of the 37 companies that helped found the alliance. Others include Adobe, CrowdStrike, NVIDIA, Palo Alto Networks and Siemens.
Like the open letter, the alliance acknowledged that there were real risks to open-source AI models, including the lack of guardrails around cyberattack assistance. But “the right response is not to deny defenders access to capable open systems,” the alliance said. “It is to pair openness with strong safeguards, clear rules against malicious misuse, rigorous evaluation and rapid remediation.”
Cyber defenders need both open- and closed-source AI models to protect critical infrastructure and other important computer systems, the alliance said.
“Blanket restrictions on open frontier AI systems would weaken defensive capacity and risk concentrating power, dependence and vulnerability in a few closed providers,” the members wrote.
