A Split That Became Public On July 24, 2026, a coalition of more than 25 American technology companies published a joint letter titled “Open Weights and American AI Leadership,” urging Washington not to restrict open weight AI models. By July 30, more than 230 companies and organisations had signed. The signatories include Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, IBM, Dell, Palantir, Andreessen Horowitz, Hugging Face, Mistral, Cloudflare, and the Linux Foundation. Notably absent was Anthropic, and the fault line this exposed has become the most consequential dispute in AI policy right now. The letter’s central argument is direct: “Our AI leadership will be judged not by one frontier AI model, but by whether…