The success of Chinese open-weight AI models has reignited a Silicon Valley debate over whether America’s AI future should remain closed or embrace openness. Recently, 50 companies and organisations, including NVIDIA, Microsoft, Meta, IBM, Dell Technologies, Mozilla, Palantir, Mistral, and Perplexity, signed a public letter urging US lawmakers not to impose restrictions on open-weight AI models, with Anthropic and Amazon noticeably absent. Separately, NVIDIA, along with more than 40 technology companies, launched the Open Secure AI Alliance, an industry initiative focused on developing open technologies for AI safety and cybersecurity, arguing that open models should be treated as defensive infrastructure. The debate has been driven by China’s rapid progress with models such as Kimi K3 and GLM 5.2, whose performance is approaching that of US frontier models such as Fable 5 and GPT-5.6. The alliance cited the recent Hugging Face security incident, where Hugging Face relied on the open-weight GLM 5.2 model to analyse more than 17,000 actions after closed AI services were unable to support forensic analysis. Last week, the US accused Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI of distilling Anthropic’s Fable model to train Kimi K3, with White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios alleging Moonshot developed a sophisticated internal platform for large-scale distillation.