Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta warn against overregulating open-weight models

Posted by louiereederson 6 hours ago

256 points | 149 comments

dang 1 hour ago|

From yesterday:

Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49023016 - July 2026 (841 comments)

Also related:

OpenAI and Anthropic unite against open-weight AI risks to their bottom line - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49020868 - July 2026 (330 comments)

China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48979269 - July 2026 (932 comments)

The gap between open weights LLMs and closed source LLMs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48692058 - June 2026 (250 comments)

The unbearable cheapness of open weight models - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48668255 - June 2026 (186 comments)

etiennebausson 1 hour ago|

> The unbearable cheapness of open weight models

So the closed model try to get client with their model by saying it's cheaper than employees, and then turn around to lawyer-out cheaper alternative?

Truly the american dream.

palmotea 26 minutes ago|||

The important thing is that Sam Altman and Dario Amodei become trillionaires. Everything must be decided in service of that one primary goal.

thewebguyd 1 hour ago|||

And the verdict is still out on if it's going to be cheaper than employees in the long run. Maybe for companies in HCoL areas (SV/NYC), but any smaller mid-market org in a LCoL area, frontier model token spend may not end up all that cheaper when your employee salaries are $55k-$75k/year so you're mostly evaluating it as an additional force multiplier expense rather than a headcount replacer.

Wowfunhappy 17 minutes ago|||

For hosted models, there's no way to know what the real costs are. But we know what it costs to run the open models, and moore's law tells us that it's going to get cheaper, at least for the same capabilities they have today.

davkan 48 minutes ago||||

Those salaries seem low for mid sized cities even no?

edot 26 minutes ago|||

Nope, not low at all. In the Midwest that’s exceedingly normal, even for non-entry level. $70k a year is living good in the Midwest, especially if dual income household ($140k a year is plenty when a decent house goes for $300k).

davkan 5 minutes ago||

Fair enough, 55k would’ve seemed pretty low to me in the NE for a fresh dev. Not 75k though.

Spartan-S63 28 minutes ago|||

I think they're generalizing beyond software engineers with what they're saying. G&A, Marketing, etc roles pay significantly less than software engineers and that $55-75k figure is realistic in lower cost of living areas. Even in Colorado, which the Denver Metro Area is HCOL, there are companies (smaller, regional, not national/global) still offering that level of salary.

davkan 25 minutes ago||

Yeah that would make more sense. Though it seems to me AI is currently better at reducing dev headcount than most other roles.

idiotsecant 37 minutes ago|||

55k??

tentahedronic 8 minutes ago||

That is a completely normal programmer salary in many countries, Silicon valley wages are just nuts. For example in Finland 55k before taxes is pretty good for ordinary non-wizard guy who can code, if you are a junior 40k is more realistic (and finding job in the first place can be a huge chaĺlenge..).

novaleaf 35 minutes ago||

Some irony: I subscribe to Claude and Codex (20x plans), and now Kimi.

Why Kimi? because K3 is the only frontier model I can have a serious conversation with about my product's security.

(I did apply for OpenAi's Cyber Pilot but got no response)

torginus 19 minutes ago|

The product strategy of 'consumer-grade' AI making deliberately insecure software, and then selling you limited access to the model that can fix it (if they think you deserve to pay them) is just diabolical.

(Grade 3 AI which can hack both previous tiers is exclusively sold to the highest bidder.)

realusername 58 seconds ago||

> AI making deliberately insecure software, and then selling you limited access to the model that can fix it (if they think you deserve to pay them) is just diabolical.

It's also not a very good marketing strategy, secure software and quality also goes in pair and it just makes me doubt about the output of Fable/Sol

Linserin 5 hours ago||

Just saw on Microsoft

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/top...

mmusc 57 minutes ago||

Makes sense Microsoft is placing it self as a model host and os providing open weight models for much cheaper on their infra already.

No wonder openai and anthropic are terrified

thewebguyd 44 minutes ago||

Makes sense for Microsoft. Copilot is already capable of being model agnostic (both GH Copilot, obviously, and M365 as well). They're an enterprise software & services company, they want to sell integrated AI tooling in their stack, powered by whatever models their customers want rather than any specific model.

Models are quickly becoming a dumb pipe, like an ISP. Just a commodity. The labs should rightfully be terrified, eventually the value isn't going to come from the model itself but the tools & integrations built on top. Non-tech businesses and non-tech employees don't want to buy API access to a model, they want to buy off the shelf software with its capabilities packaged up into a pretty, easy to use GUI.

Panoramix 30 minutes ago||

I don't know about that, a lot of those bloated enterprise solutions are becoming obsolete fast, and integrations becoming a moot point as these models advance.

andai 1 hour ago||

[dead]

GodelNumbering 1 hour ago||

I posted earlier on reddit that at this point, the closed source lobby wanting to ban open weights is effectively outgunned (musk also publicly supported this).

The oddly reminds me of back in the day when SOPA had caused a similar stir (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act), and all HN was up in arms against it.

christina97 5 hours ago||

I wonder what is happening behind closed doors for these companies to be issuing such a joint letter.

bmurphy1976 1 hour ago||

NVIDIA sells the tools. The more the better it is for them.

Microsoft and Meta are also-rans at this point. Their best hope of catching up is probably leveraging their infra and open models.

Jagerbizzle 58 minutes ago||

"leveraging their infra" is a pretty solid play, considering the scope of investments these two companies have made thus far.

jackb4040 32 minutes ago||

It does however totally abandon the question of making a profitable mass-market AI product upon which the scale of those investments was based.

somenameforme 1 hour ago|||

The future will probably have most of all companies running local models, simply because the alternative would be essentially every company that uses LLMs ending up becoming completely dependent upon Anthropic et al. And that dependence would be milked to the point of absurdity once solidly established.

And as a more general point - more major competitors in a domain is very good for everybody except those competitors themselves, who would rather there be as few as possible.

bogdanoff_2 52 minutes ago||

Is that different from how companies are reliant on cloud computing?

moralestapia 45 minutes ago||

Yes. No law prevents you from provisioning and using your own hardware.

TheBicPen 5 minutes ago||

There absolutely are laws restricting what hardware you are allowed to use. e.g. https://www.fcc.gov/faqs-recent-updates-fcc-covered-list-reg...

petcat 1 hour ago|||

Nvidia is subject to export restrictions on GPUs to China. So Chinese labs have responded by allowing American hosts to run their open-weight models in the US, where there are no restrictions. We see this in the EU too where Scaleway, and now Hetzner are getting into the inference host space serving Chinese open-weight models.

So Nvidia benefits from more inference providers running many Chinese models that they otherwise would not have been able to service.

bee_rider 50 minutes ago||

Oh, that’s interesting. I think the general expectation was that blocking exports to China would result in companies there building their own cards competing with NVIDIA. If it has incentivized them to release open weight models instead, that seems like an unexpected win.

Aissen 30 minutes ago|||

They've seen the government officials parroting OpenAI and Anthropic lobbies talking points, and they have smart enough people to see the signs of upcoming regulatory capture.

If I were cynical, I'd say it isn't helped by the current US administration.

paxys 5 hours ago|||

Different companies have different motivations. I'm sure some are genuine, but a lot of them simply lost the race (to OpenAI/Anthropic/Google) and know they can't compete anymore, so are shifting strategies. How many times has Microsoft done exactly this in the past?

cyanydeez 5 hours ago||

looking at both openai and anthropic; they are winning something, but a sober look at their finances will make you silently mouth "but what did they win".

infamouscow 54 minutes ago|||

They want to be the successor to Enron.

fidotron 4 hours ago|||

If there are effectively only two AI companies allowed to train or run model inference then demand for hosting, GPUs and data centers goes down, so they'd be able to squeeze their suppliers that much more too.

onlyrealcuzzo 29 minutes ago|||

Probably the fact that they don't want Anthropic or Google or OpenAI to have access to their data theoretically, and that they do want to use good AI, and that they don't want to spend the money themselves to make a good model...

thewebguyd 35 minutes ago|||

Probably a real effort to push for some kind of sanctions or commerce block on Chinese models. Anthropic just doubled their political spending to $40 mil for the midterms to push for "AI Safety."

ErneX 3 hours ago|||

They are worried about OpenAI and Anthropic making their own processors and controlling the whole stack is my guess.

swiftcoder 1 hour ago||

They really don't need to be very worried about that. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, et al have decades of experience in shipping custom hardware at scale, and it is not a simple field to pivot into

ErneX 32 minutes ago||

True, but Google has their own models and did not sign this either.

The other thing that comes to mind is they want to avoid the government from banning open models as has been suggested by some of the closed models providers.

ma2kx 2 hours ago||

It would be interesting to know how many optimizations of the Chinese models were incorporated back into Claude and Codex.

Frost1x 35 minutes ago|

To some degree even unintentionally this is all inevitable. I know this isn’t what you’re taking about, but it’s a similar line of thought. These models are consuming public free information, and they’re all also producing free public information, so they’re all pissing and drinking into same pool.

If we go down the line of dead internet theory which I’m becoming more convinced of these days, the volume of information that’s not necessarily original or extracted from reality and just interpolated and extrapolated from existing information in different ways by LLMs will greatly outnumber human information coming up.

In which case these models should.. start to converge on the same data I imagine, with slightly different behaviors within that. One big generative orgy feedback loop.

lr1970 3 hours ago||

The list of companies that signed this letter is telling (including Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft). Equally telling is the list of companies that did not sign it -- including Google, Amazon.

bhelkey 17 minutes ago||

> Equally telling is the list of companies that did not sign it -- including Google, Amazon.

Could you elaborate? I don't understand your implication.

Amazon in particular hosts open weight models via Amazon Bedrock (e.g. Ministral 14B 3.0, DeepSeek V3.2, ...)[1].

In case it changes the context of this comment, I am a Meta employee, all opinions are my own.

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock/latest/userguide/model-c...

credit_guy 5 hours ago||

If you see the long 3rd paragraph twice, know that you are not alone.

gilfoyle_7 3 hours ago||

MSFT, dell, NVIDIA. These guys will make money no matter who uses what AI since they're the hardware providers. Even though they all own stake in frontier labs, chinese open weight models will commoditize the intelligence layer.

Catloafdev 4 hours ago|

Reassuring to see this backed by major players.

This is the correct stance, hopefully this is the stance that prevails.

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