Canadian AI scaleup Cohere signed an open letter shared by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in his first post on X last week, supporting the release of open-weight AI models to build a more competitive and accessible AI economy in the US. The letter defines open-weight models as large language models (LLMs) that can be freely downloaded, inspected, modified, and run on custom infrastructure. Initially launched with 25 signatories including Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft, and Palantir, the letter amassed more than 50 signatures by Saturday, when Cohere—the sole Canadian-headquartered company on the list—announced it had signed on. Cohere co-founder Nick Frosst wrote on X, “This tech needs to be controlled by the people who use it, otherwise it’s just another piece of tech oligarchy control.” Nearly every big AI company has signed, except Anthropic, which was last valued at $965 billion USD ($1.4 trillion CAD). Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei agreed that open-weight models expand access but argued they “necessarily make it easier to develop safeguards.” The letter warns against “misappropriation” of US models via distillation and calls for “targeted legal and commercial frameworks.”