Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Satya Nadella Show ‘Overwhelming Support’ for Open-Weight AI Models as OpenAI, Anthropic Stay Silent

by | Jul 25, 2026 | General

On Friday, Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) and Space Exploration Technologies Corp (NASDAQ:SPCX) CEO Elon Musk joined Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella and Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg in endorsing open-weight AI models.

Satya Nadella Calls for Open-Weight AI

Nadella championed open-weight AI models, describing them as “essential to a healthy AI ecosystem.”

In a post on X, Nadella wrote, “Together with others across our industry, we are outlining a path for open-weight models to strengthen American competitiveness and expand economic opportunity, while protecting national security.”

His post linked to a joint industry statement signed by Microsoft, Meta Platforms Inc., Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA), IBM Corp. (NYSE:IBM), Mistral AI, Hugging Face, Andreessen Horowitz and several other organizations.


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Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk Rally Behind Open Source

Zuckerberg echoed Nadella’s message, posting on X, “Open source is a positive and important force for both empowering people and preventing centralization. Proud to support this.”

Musk later shared Zuckerberg’s post, writing, “Overwhelming support for open source.”

Tech Giants Urge US To Back Open-Weight AI

On Friday, Nvidia, Meta and Microsoft joined 22 other organizations in signing a statement urging U.S. policymakers to support open-weight AI models.

Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL), Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), OpenAI and Anthropic did not sign.

OpenAI and Anthropic have reportedly been advocating tighter restrictions on Chinese open-source AI models, arguing they could be exploited once released publicly.

The debate intensified after Beijing-based Moonshot AI launched its open-weight Kimi K3 model on July 16, which reportedly approached frontier-level performance and rattled chip stocks.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang also backed the initiative, writing in his first-ever X post that open models “strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty.”

Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.

Image via Shutterstock


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