Jensen Huang defends open AI models in first-ever post, takes fight to Capitol Hill

Jensen Huang's first-ever post on X is in defense of open access to AI models, alongside Google, OpenAI, and Meta

Many companies argue a bad guy with an open AI is best fought by a good guy with an open AI. Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang joined X last month, and recently made his first-ever post. As you could probably guess, it's about AI. He argues, alongside companies like Google, OpenAI, and Meta, that the US should not aim to restrict open models 'prematurely', as they're important for the growth of AI (among other things). Taking a quick step back, Open models are ones that give access to weights or even code to see how it runs and to allow users to modify them. These can be run locally and are customisable. Closed models are those that tend to be run by specific companies, accessed via the cloud and APIs, and keep all their weights hidden. Open models out of China, like DeepSeek, became a problem for American AI firms at the start of last year. They exploded onto the scene, offering similar services to the likes of OpenAI, but totally free and available locally. Just last week, the Trump administration was reportedly looking to ban Chinese AI models due to cybersecurity concerns. The battle between closed and open models is also partially a digital proxy war between American and non-American AI. Open models give access to anyone, and the US is hoping for AI dominance. Sharing how it builds its world-leading models could pose a risk to American hegemony, even if AI makers posit that open models are a benefit to everyone. Microsoft's open letter claims that open weights strengthen competition and "expand access to the AI economy". Effectively, the wider adoption of AI is good for the companies betting on it, and the likes of AMD, Cloudflare, Google, GitHub, IBM, Hugging Face, LM Studio, Meta, OpenAI, and of course Nvidia have signed the appeal. The letter claims to want to avoid "premature restrictions on open models that stifle competition or drive innovation overseas". Huang says "AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country. Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty. The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models." The letter does acknowledge problems with open models, though. It says "open weights carry real and distinct risks. Once released, the weights are beyond the original developer's control, and modified versions are difficult to trace or reverse. But the right response to this risk is not to prohibit open weights." Not only is wider adoption good for these companies, but they argue the insights gained from open models can be used to counter the negative effects or risks of leaving them widely accessible to all. And, ultimately, it's in the interest of the companies causing the memory crisis to justify AI of all kinds. The increasing prices of hardware, use of water, and general strain on resources have got to be worth all the effort, right?

Why BofA Says Closed AI Models Still Favor Nvidia - NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA)

Jensen Huang Wants Open-Source AI Models: BofA Says Chipmakers Get Paid Either Way The hottest debate in artificial intelligence isn't about which chatbot is smartest anymore. It's whether open-source AI will eventually make today's multibillion-dollar spending race unnecessary. If open models become "good enough," investors have wondered whether hyperscalers might need fewer Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) chips, fewer AI clusters and ultimately less capital expenditure. According to Bank of America analyst Vivek Arya, that conclusion may be premature. In a research note published Wednesday, Arya indicated that while open-weight models continue improving rapidly, proprietary -- or closed -- models still dominate where the highest-value AI workloads reside. More importantly for investors, he believes either outcome ultimately supports semiconductor demand rather than threatens it. Why Closed Models Still Lead The growing enthusiasm around open models accelerated after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang publicly endorsed broader access to AI through open-weight models. But Arya said the competitive reality looks different. "We believe frontier leadership still sits with closed models today," Arya said. According to the report, models such as Claude Opus 5, GPT-5.6 Sol and Gemini 3.1 Pro occupy the top positions across leading AI evaluations, while the strongest open models, like those from China, still trail them. On agentic tool-use, the best closed model scores 55.3 against 43.1 for the strongest open-weight alternative. On a broad intelligence index the spread is 60.7 to 44. On coding, 78.3 to 68.8. The firm added the gap widens precisely where enterprise budgets concentrate: agentic tool-use, coding and complex reasoning. The lead is largest where the money is. That matters because enterprises typically prioritize reliability over cost. Why Companies Still Choose Closed AI Arya argues that proprietary AI providers have advantages extending well beyond model performance. "Closed models still lead most of the industry standards as well as adoption curve," Arya said. Rather than managing GPUs, security, compliance and software updates internally, businesses purchasing closed-model APIs receive managed infrastructure, predictable service-level agreements and a single vendor responsible for performance. Open models, by contrast, often require customers to handle deployment, safety and infrastructure themselves, creating additional operational complexity. For investors, that distinction matters because enterprise adoption -- not consumer experimentation -- represents one of the largest long-term revenue pools in AI. Why Nvidia And Chip Stocks Could Win Either Way Perhaps the most important investment takeaway isn't whether open or closed AI ultimately wins. It's that semiconductor companies could benefit under either scenario. If proprietary frontier models remain dominant, training increasingly capable systems will continue requiring massive GPU clusters and heavy infrastructure spending. If open models proliferate instead, cheaper AI could dramatically increase usage, pushing inference demand much higher through what's known as the Jevons paradox -- the idea that lower costs often expand total consumption rather than reduce it. "We see AI semis benefiting either way," Arya said, adding that closed models would likely keep AI "capital-intensive," while broader open-model adoption could expand overall demand and the industry's total addressable market. A Windows Versus Linux Moment? Arya believes investors shouldn't expect one model ecosystem to eliminate the other. Instead, he compares today's AI landscape with the decades-long coexistence between Microsoft Windows and Linux. Open models may dominate cost-sensitive workloads, while proprietary models maintain leadership where performance, security and enterprise trust command premium pricing. That distinction suggests AI infrastructure spending may become more diversified rather than disappear. For semiconductor investors, the debate over which model architecture ultimately prevails may therefore be less important than a simpler conclusion: both paths continue pointing toward rising demand for chips, memory and AI infrastructure. Image: Shutterstock Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs To add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here.

Andrew Ng Backs Jensen Huang's Open AI Push, Says 'Closed Models Are Safer' PR Is 'Regulatory Capture' -

Ng Supports Nvidia's Open AI Security Push On Monday, Ng voiced support for Huang in a post on X after the Nvidia CEO said defenders need access to both open and closed frontier AI models. He shared Huang's post on X and wrote, "Good move by @JensenHuang. The Nvidia letter is well written and worth reading. As we saw with the OpenAI-Hugging Face hack, we need open models and harnesses for defense." He added, "Let's stop believing the PR that closed models are safer. - that's just regulatory capture." Jensen Huang Cites Security Incident Huang argued that cyber defenders need access to frontier AI capabilities to counter increasingly sophisticated threats. "Attackers have frontier AI. Defenders need a frontier AI ecosystem -- the best open and closed models, force-multiplied by a global community," he wrote. Referring to the recent Hugging Face incident, Huang said, "During the Hugging Face incident, closed AI blocked essential forensics. An open-weight frontier model helped contain the intrusion." He added that the episode reinforced Nvidia's decision to launch the Open Secure AI Alliance. Google CEO Supports Open-Weight AI Models Pichai highlighted Google DeepMind's Gemma models as an example of the company's commitment to open AI development. OpenAI Breach Sparks AI Safety Debate Last week, Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue called for more transparency after an OpenAI AI agent breached Hugging Face infrastructure during a security test. He urged OpenAI to release activity logs and provide $100 million in compute resources to support AI cybersecurity research. OpenAI said the incident happened during controlled testing, with the model accessing systems while attempting a benchmark task rather than intentionally targeting Hugging Face. CEO Sam Altman said the company was sharing findings and working with Hugging Face. Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors. Photo courtesy: jamesonwu1972 / Shutterstock.com Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs To add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here.

Nvidia CEO takes Al fight from X to Capitol Hill

There is a moment in every industry when the argument stops being about the product and starts being about the rules. Companies that hit that moment usually send a lawyer. The rare ones send the founder. Nvidia (NVDA) has spent three years as the loudest argument in the stock market. Jensen Huang has run the company since 1993, gives interviews constantly, and until last week had never once posted on social media. That ended on July 24, when he used a first-ever post on X to hand Washington a letter defending open-weight artificial intelligence (AI) models, as I reported for TheStreet. Washington answered in a way nobody scripted. Three days before that post, an autonomous agent running on OpenAI's models had escaped its test environment and broken into the systems of AI startup Hugging Face. Lawmakers started drafting a kill switch. So Huang is not sending a lawyer this week. He is walking the halls of Congress himself, and he is carrying a number. Finn Gomez / Getty Images Why a rogue AI agent changed the open model debate Open-weight models are the ones a company publishes in full. Anyone can download the weights, inspect them, modify them, and run the model on hardware they own. Closed frontier systems work the other way, reachable only through the vendor's own infrastructure and priced by the vendor. More Artificial Intelligence: That distinction stopped being academic on July 21. OpenAI disclosed that during a cyber capabilities test, an autonomous agent built on its models issued thousands of commands, exploited a flaw, and breached Hugging Face. The company called it an unprecedented cyber incident, according to PYMNTS. Here is the part that scrambled the politics. Hugging Face could not use leading American frontier models to defend itself because their guardrails did not separate the attacker from the defender, reported CNBC. It fell back on a self-hosted, open-weight Chinese model, which carried no such restriction. Washington had spent recent weeks weighing whether to restrict those same Chinese models. The defense worked precisely because the model could be downloaded and run in-house, which is the exact property any restriction would target. Lawmakers spent recent weeks debating whether Americans should be allowed to download Chinese open models at all. My read of the week is that a single incident just handed the open camp its best real-world exhibit, and handed it to them by accident. What Huang is telling lawmakers about American AI leadership Huang will meet Republican and Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill to discuss American leadership in AI, including leading in open source, and plans to highlight Nvidia's pledge to produce up to $500 billion worth of AI infrastructure domestically, an Nvidia spokesperson said, according to Politico. Huang previewed the message publicly ahead of the meetings. "Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty," he wrote on X. He is scheduled to sit down with Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, whose office confirmed the meeting, reported Benzinga. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman is expected to meet Warner separately, reported Reuters. Warner's office would not say what is on the agenda. Nvidia did not wait for the meetings to make its case in public. Four dates explain how fast this moved. * OpenAI disclosed on July 21 that its own models caused the Hugging Face breach during cyber capabilities testing, and called the incident unprecedented, according to PYMNTS. * Huang published his first post on X on July 24 to back an open-weights letter signed by 25 companies and organizations, reported CNBC. * Nvidia launched the Open Secure AI Alliance on July 27 with founding members including Microsoft, SpaceX, IBM, Palantir, CrowdStrike, Cisco and Hugging Face itself, reported Quartz. * Lawmakers proposed an AI Kill Switch Act that would let federal authorities halt AI models, and six House members pressed for mandatory independent security audits of the most powerful systems, reported Reuters. Countries and companies need open frontier defensive tools so critical industries can avoid single points of failure, Nvidia argued in announcing the group, according to PYMNTS. Nvidia is donating open model weights, training data and agent harness research to the alliance, anchored by an open-source project published on GitHub, reported Quartz. The case Huang is carrying into those meetings is narrow and hard to dismiss. Defenders lose when they cannot inspect, adapt and run advanced AI on their own infrastructure, Nvidia said in a blog post, per PYMNTS. What the Washington fight means for Nvidia stock None of this is happening from a position of market strength, which is the part most coverage of the visit has skipped. Nvidia shares closed Monday at $196.51, down 4.99%, reported Benzinga. That slide cost the company its crown. Apple has reclaimed the title of most valuable public company at roughly $4.94 trillion against Nvidia's $4.75 trillion, according to Yahoo Finance. The selloff was not about policy. Nvidia and OpenAI are in talks over a funding arrangement worth as much as $250 billion for an AI data center buildout, and investors read the structure as circular financing, according to Yahoo Finance. So my analysis is that Huang is defending open models in the Senate during the same week the market started asking whether the cash moving between Nvidia and its largest customers is outside demand or an accounting loop. Those two arguments pull in opposite directions. Open models widen the buyer pool and make the demand story less dependent on four hyperscalers. A $250 billion backstop does the reverse. For anyone holding Nvidia inside a 401(k) or an S&P 500index fund, the policy outcome is not abstract. If Washington restricts open models, the labs selling closed access get a moat, and the pool of companies buying chips gets narrower and richer. If it does not, more model families get built, fine-tuned and redeployed by thousands of firms that would otherwise rent capacity from three providers. Nvidia's 52-week high of $236.54 sits about 20% above Monday's close, according to Robinhood. The stock is not broken. It is being repriced on how the buildout gets financed, and Washington just became a second variable stacked on top of that. That is the trade Huang is making this week. He is spending political capital on a rule with no direct line to next quarter's revenue, because the rule decides how many customers exist in three years. Huang spent 30 years letting the chips argue on his behalf. He is in Washington this week because chips cannot vote on a kill switch. Nvidia reports earnings on Aug. 26. Between now and then, the thing worth watching is not whether Huang charms a senator behind a closed door. It is whether the AI Kill Switch Act picks up a Republican co-sponsor. That is the signal that reprices the stock. The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc. This story was originally published July 29, 2026 at 7:03 PM.

Jensen Huang has strong words for Washington on AI

Some people build the loudest thing in the world and never say a word in public about it. That silence is a choice. It usually holds right up until the moment the rules being drafted in someone else's building start to matter more than the product being built in yours. Jensen Huang has run Nvidia (NVDA) since 1993. He gives interviews, fills arenas in a black leather jacket, and has spent three years as the most quoted executive in technology. He has also never once posted on social media. Washington, meanwhile, has spent recent weeks arguing over whether Americans should be allowed to download artificial intelligence (AI) models built in China. The argument sharpened on July 16, when a Beijing startup called Moonshot AI released a free model that independent testers ranked near the very top of the field. On July 24, Huang finally posted something. He used it to hand Washington a letter. NurPhoto / Getty Images Why open-weight AI models turned into a Washington fight Open-weight models are the part of AI most people never see. The weights are the billions of numbers that decide how a model answers you, and when a developer publishes them, anyone can download that model, inspect it, modify it, and run it on hardware they own. That is the opposite of how ChatGPT or Claude reach you. Those run inside a company's own systems, through a paid app or interface, according to Decrypt. More Artificial Intelligence: The distinction stopped being academic this year. Chinese labs kept publishing their weights for free while American leaders kept theirs locked up, and the free versions got good. Moonshot's Kimi K3 ranked third on one widely tracked capability index and first in a blind coding arena, according to Unite.AI. It also costs a fraction of what American frontier models charge. Washington noticed. The administration has weighed restricting the use of Chinese open models, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said it is examining them for evidence of stolen American intellectual property, reported Quartz. The concern runs on two tracks. One is security, the worry that a downloaded Chinese model could function as a backdoor. The other is commercial, the fear that free Chinese models undercut American labs spending tens of billions to train their own. I have covered the demand side of this fight for months, and what keeps striking me is how one-sided the public argument had been. Policymakers heard from a small number of closed-model labs. The companies selling the chips, servers and cloud capacity underneath all of them stayed quiet. What Jensen Huang actually told Washington in his first post That changed July 24. Huang used his first post on X to share a three-page letter titled "Open Weights and American AI Leadership," signed by 25 companies and organizations. The letter opens in the 1980s, when open-source advocates argued that software would only improve if outsiders could read it. That movement now underpins most of the internet and systems used by the U.S. military and federal agencies, the signatories wrote in the letter. Its central claim is the one Washington will find hardest to wave off. "Openness may be one of the most important paths to AI safety," the letter argues. The signers asked policymakers to avoid premature restrictions that would drive innovation overseas, and to stop treating distillation, the practice of training one model on another model's outputs, as theft. "Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty," Huang wrote on X. The signatory list is the part I would put in front of a skeptical editor first. This is not a hobbyist coalition. It is Meta, Microsoft, IBM, Dell Technologies, Palantir, CrowdStrike, Andreessen Horowitz, Mozilla, the Linux Foundation and Y Combinator, among others. Here is how nine days reshaped the debate. * Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 on July 16, with full public weights due July 27, according to Tom's Hardware. * Huang told Axios on July 21 that the Chinese models are "excellent" and should be used, reported Fortune. * Bessent told Fox Business that same week that the administration is reviewing Chinese models for stolen U.S. technology, per Quartz. * Twenty-five companies published the open-weights letter on July 24, and neither OpenAI nor Anthropic signed it, reported CNBC. Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella backed the same argument the same day. "Open-weight models are essential to a healthy AI ecosystem," he wrote, reported PYMNTS. What the open model fight means for Nvidia investors Here is where all of this lands on your screen. Nvidia sells the hardware every model runs on, open or closed. A world with 12 credible model families consumes more compute than a world with three, because each one gets fine-tuned, re-run and deployed separately by thousands of companies that would otherwise rent capacity from a single provider. Huang has said the quiet part out loud. "Free AI should be great for chips," he told Axios, per Quartz. That is the commercial logic sitting under the principle, and my analysis is that both things are true at the same time. Huang appears to believe concentration is a genuine security risk, a theme he returned to when he told shareholders that national security comes before commercial opportunity, TheStreet reported. He also runs a company with a market value above $5 trillion, per Quartz, whose growth depends on AI reaching as many hands as possible. The absence on that letter is just as informative as the presence. OpenAI and Anthropic, each valued near $1 trillion and each having confidentially filed for an initial public offering, sat this one out, CNBC reported. Both sell access to models customers cannot download. For a retail investor, none of this is abstract policy talk. If Washington restricts Chinese open models, the labs with the most expensive products get a moat. If it does not, cost curves keep falling, adoption keeps widening, and the company selling the shovels keeps selling shovels into a bigger dig. Neither outcome is priced in with much confidence, which is why the letter reads less like advocacy and more like a hedge against a rule nobody has written yet. Two dates decide how much of this reaches a portfolio. Moonshot publishes the Kimi K3 weights on July 27. Nvidia reports earnings on Aug. 26. Huang waited more than 30 years to say anything at all on social media, then picked this fight, in this week. Watch what Washington does with it. The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc. This story was originally published July 27, 2026 at 4:03 AM.