Open-weight AI models are the backbone of America's innovation engine — and restricting them would hand China the advantage Washington is trying to prevent.

Evidence For

• 25 major companies — including Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral, Hugging Face, and Replit — signed an open letter Friday urging policymakers to avoid "premature restrictions" on open-weight AI models.
• The letter draws an explicit parallel to the 1980s open-source software wars, when large businesses...