In July 2026, technology companies including OpenAI, Meta, Google, NVIDIA, Hugging Face, and Black Forest Labs jointly signed a statement, asserting that open-weight AI models are crucial for driving technological innovation, fostering industry competition, and ensuring AI safety. These models allow anyone to download, inspect, modify, and deploy them, lowering technical barriers, promoting AI adoption across various industries, preventing technological monopolies, ensuring the sharing of development benefits, and granting users control over their data and models. The statement also calls on policymakers to support the development of open models and clearly distinguish between legitimate technological improvements and illegal value appropriation.
