Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta and 22 Others Sign an Open-Weights Letter — OpenAI, Anthropic and Google All Declined

CNBC (primary: images.nvidia.com/pdf/Open-Weights-and-American-AI-Leadership.pdf)·high signal

A 25-company letter titled 'Open Weights and American AI Leadership,' hosted as a PDF on Nvidia's own servers and dated July 24, 2026, warns Washington against 'premature restrictions' on open-weight models. Signatories include Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Andreessen Horowitz, IBM, Dell, Palantir, Mistral, Hugging Face, Y Combinator, Mozilla, the Linux Foundation, Perplexity, CrowdStrike, and Replit — while OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are all conspicuously absent. Sam Altman said he was 'glad to see this' without signing, a straddle that r/LocalLLaMA spent the day picking apart (566 upvotes on 'Why won't he sign the letter then?'); a separate thread found Microsoft's corporate-responsibility page listing OpenAI among signatories, which the letter itself does not. This is the frontier-lab coalition splitting in public over open weights, and it is distinct from the ~200-startup Politico letter about Chinese open-weight models earlier in the week.