NVIDIA's Open-Weights Coalition Grows to 50 Companies; Anthropic Hasn't Signed

On July 24, 2026, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang made his first post on X the coalition letter "Open Weights and American AI Leadership," which urges US authorities not to restrict open AI models. Within a day the number of signatory companies doubled from 25 to 50, but Anthropic still has not signed it.

Who signed the letter

Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, put together the "Open Weights and American AI Leadership" letter, and within the first 24 hours the list of signatories doubled to 50 technology companies. The biggest addition was Google: both Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, and Demis Hassabis, head of Google DeepMind, publicly endorsed the initiative. The letter calls on Washington not to impose restrictions on the distribution of open models and frames openness as a condition of American leadership in AI.

• Publication date: July 24, 2026, Huang's first post on X
• Signatories after one day: 50, up from 25 the day before
• Signers include NVIDIA, Microsoft, Meta, Google and OpenAI
• Anthropic and Amazon did not sign the letter
• Google's open-weights Gemma models have been downloaded more than 300 million times

Why Google joined

Google backed the letter because it is betting on open models itself. Sundar Pichai noted that the company has long developed open-source software and already releases open weights in the Gemma family. Demis Hassabis cited numbers: Gemma has been downloaded more than 300 million times, and he named the JAX framework, the transformer architecture and the AlphaFold project as Google DeepMind's contributions to the open ecosystem. Hassabis also proposed going beyond a slogan and establishing a single standardizing framework that would support both open and proprietary models.

Demis

Hassabis pointed out that Gemma's open weights have been downloaded more than 300 million times and proposed a single standardizing framework for open and proprietary models. — Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind

Why Anthropic didn't sign

Anthropic is the only major frontier lab that did not add its signature, and the company has given no official position. Instead of a corporate statement, only one employee responded on X: researcher Julian Schrittwieser, who sarcastically suggested that NVIDIA open-source CUDA in return, and Microsoft open-source Windows and Office.

According to CNBC, Anthropic is quietly lobbying in Washington for restrictions on open models, which would explain its absence from the list. The refusal fits a long-running conflict: Jensen Huang has said publicly that he disagrees with almost everything Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says. Amazon, Anthropic's largest investor, also ignored the letter, although it is not considered a leader in the large language model segment; Google itself also invests in Anthropic.

A separate episode coincided with the dispute over Anthropic: researcher Andrej Karpathy removed the company from his X profile 68 days after joining, which set off rumors that he was leaving.

"Strange disinformation,"

Andrej Karpathy said of the rumors about his departure from Anthropic; he has still not restored the company mention to his X profile.

What this means

The open-weights debate has turned into a public dividing line between the frontier labs: NVIDIA, Google and OpenAI favor the free distribution of models, while Anthropic holds to a cautious, regulated approach. A company's stance on openness is now as visible as its models, and the coalition's growth to 50 members in a single day shows which side the public majority of the industry is on, for now.

Frequently asked questions

Who signed Huang's open-weights letter?

Within a day, 50 companies joined the "Open Weights and American AI Leadership" letter, including Google, OpenAI, NVIDIA, Microsoft and Meta. Among the major players, Anthropic and Amazon did not sign.

Why didn't Anthropic sign the letter?

Anthropic has not given an official position. According to CNBC, the company is in fact lobbying in Washington for restrictions on open models, which runs directly counter to the appeal of Huang's coalition.

*Meta has been designated an extremist organization and is banned in Russia.