US tech giants are coming together to protect open weight models.

The rumor mill was churning: the US government was reportedly considering a ban on open weight models. If you're not familiar, open weight models are completely free to download, unlike closed models like Claude or ChatGPT.

With the gap closing between open weight models and frontier closed models like Fable and ChatGPT-5.6, these free downloads pose a serious threat to the profitability of companies like Anthropic and OpenAI.

The theory was that large AI model providers like Anthropic and OpenAI were in the ear of the administration, trying to eliminate some of their competition before they IPO.

Ironic, considering how much the US touts the free market.

Days later, NVIDIA released a public letter, signed by 50 of the largest tech companies in the US, calling for the protection of open AI models.

Surprisingly, both Google and OpenAI signed. While both are pushing their closed frontier models, it's worth noting that each has released an open weight model of its own at some point.

The most notable name missing from the list?

Anthropic.

Anthropic has never released an open weight model, and its business model relies heavily on enterprises paying exorbitant bills to use its closed AI model, Claude.

What do you think about Anthropic sitting out this kumbaya?

Are they slowly losing the goodwill they've built up? Or would you never expect them to join an effort like this?