Republican Senator Pushes Trump Team to Boost US Open-Weight AI

Republican Senator Jim Banks has called on the Trump administration to create incentives for American tech companies to build open-weight artificial intelligence models. The request, made in a letter released on Friday, adds a political dimension to an ongoing industry debate about the future of AI development.

Open-weight models, such as Meta's Muse Glimmer, Nvidia's Nemotron, and Thinking Machines' Inkling, make their core components publicly accessible. This allows users to download and fine-tune them for specific tasks, often at a lower cost than proprietary alternatives. In contrast, closed-weight systems like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and Google's Gemini are generally seen as more capable but keep their inner workings under corporate control.

Banks, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, expressed concern that Chinese open-weight models are gaining popularity in the US market. He warned that Washington must act to "limit dependence" on these foreign systems and make it harder for Chinese firms to access American semiconductors for their AI products.

"America cannot afford to see Chinese open models proliferate and burrow into the global economy only to be weaponized, like rare earths, at a time and place of China's choosing," Banks wrote in his letter to Christopher Phelan, Trump's economic adviser.

The senator's intervention comes amid a split within the tech sector. In July, Nvidia, Meta, and dozens of other US companies and venture capital firms urged policymakers to avoid restricting open-weight AI. However, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has argued that such models pose security risks because their usage is harder to monitor.