{"id":117908,"date":"2026-07-24T15:48:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-24T15:48:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/117908\/"},"modified":"2026-07-24T15:48:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-24T15:48:08","slug":"microsoft-tech-companies-throw-weight-behind-spread-of-open-source-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/117908\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft, tech companies throw weight behind spread of open-source AI"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Microsoft, along with more than two dozen tech companies, are pressing policymakers to support open-source AI systems and code across society, arguing that it will be a safer approach than attempting to restrict access or relying on a handful of closed, proprietary models.<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/corporate-responsibility\/topics\/open-weight\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">open letter<\/a>, posted Friday, draws parallels to the <a href=\"https:\/\/direct.mit.edu\/books\/monograph\/3528\/For-Fun-and-ProfitA-History-of-the-Free-and-Open\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">software industry of the 1980s<\/a>, when large businesses worried that open-source software code would cut into their business. While industry lost that battle, the end result was a vibrant ecosystem that now underpins much of the modern internet, government IT and even commercial software products.<\/p>\n<p> It also created a \u201cshared foundation of knowledge\u201d that has fed countless future software projects and innovations. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe United States now faces a similar choice with artificial intelligence,\u201d the companies wrote. \u201cOur AI leadership will be judged not by one frontier AI model, but by whether the United States builds a strong, open ecosystem that diffuses into every sector.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Expanding access and support to open-source AI comes with meaningful security risk. Cybersecurity experts <a href=\"https:\/\/cyberscoop.com\/state-hackers-using-gemini-google-ai\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">warn that one of the biggest beneficiaries<\/a> of broadly available AI tools are\u00a0 low-level criminals who until now lacked the technical expertise or resources to launch serious attacks.<\/p>\n<p>Once a model is open weight, anyone can download it, customize it, strip it of any guardrails and use it for their own purposes. As open-source models have gotten better at creating deepfakes and other AI generated imagery, <a href=\"https:\/\/cyberscoop.com\/deepfake-csam-lawsuit-grok-xai-expands-stability-ai\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">the danger of locally-customized CSAM and sexualized deepfakes<\/a> could also grow.<\/p>\n<p>But the letter argues that open-weight AI models are most beneficial to startups, universities, research labs and other small, ambitious organizations that can innovate and iterate the technology and make it more broadly useful to society.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOpen weights let every organization match the right model to the right job at the right cost, reserving frontier-scale capability for genuine frontier problems and running efficient specialized specialized models everywhere else,\u201d The companies wrote. \u201cThat discipline is what will make AI economically sustainable as its use scales into the billions of everyday tasks.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0For cybersecurity specifically, the letter argues that defenders armed with open-source AI will outpace attackers better than any closed model approach.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIn a world where cybersecurity attackers use advanced AI, defenders need access to models with comparable capabilities so they can detect, simulate, and respond to emerging threats,\u201d the companies wrote. \u201cOpen models broaden defensive capability, increase transparency, and allow vulnerabilities to be discovered and remediated across many teams.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Other notable companies signing the letter include Meta, Palantir, Perplexity, Mistral, NVIDIA, Mozilla, The Linux Foundation, Hugging Face, Dell Technologies and IBM.<\/p>\n<p>US policymakers continue to grapple with balancing unrestrained support for the domestic AI industry and providing oversight and regulation of harms that result from their use.<\/p>\n<p>The Trump administration <a href=\"https:\/\/cyberscoop.com\/trump-admin-ai-safety-cybersecurity-export-controls\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">has cycled through<\/a> several frameworks since coming into office, first a laissez-faire approach within no restrictions, then an <a href=\"https:\/\/cyberscoop.com\/donald-trump-white-house-ai-executive-order-scaled-back\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">executive order<\/a> creating a voluntary testing regime for industry, then the <a href=\"https:\/\/cyberscoop.com\/us-government-anthropic-fable-5-mythos-5-export-controls\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">imposition of export controls<\/a> on Anthropic\u2019s Fable model and reportedly pressuring OpenAI to delay the release of their models out of cybersecurity concerns.<\/p>\n<p>The letter comes as the Trump administration has <a href=\"https:\/\/www.axios.com\/2026\/07\/20\/ai-us-china-open-source-kimi\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">reportedly considered<\/a> an executive order that would restrict American access and availability to Chinese-made open-source models.<\/p>\n<p>But the White House and US companies are trying to thread a needle in recognizing the overall benefits of an open source approach while being wary of doing anything that could potentially benefit their Chinese rivals.<\/p>\n<p>Earlier this month the White House announced the creation of its <a href=\"https:\/\/cyberscoop.com\/trump-gold-eagle-ai-cyber-clearinghouse\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Gold Eagle AI cybersecurity clearinghouse<\/a> that would help coordinate government, private sector and civil society work finding and closing AI-discovered vulnerabilities. A big part of that effort, a senior White House official said, is supporting providers and maintainers of open-source AI tools.<\/p>\n<p>\t\t\t\t\t<img decoding=\"async\" class=\"author-card__image\" src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/1784908088_192_ea8b076b398ee48b71cfaecf898c582b.jpeg\" alt=\"Derek B. Johnson\"\/><\/p>\n<p>\n\t\t\tWritten by Derek B. Johnson<br \/>\n\t\t\tDerek B. Johnson is a reporter at CyberScoop, where his beat includes cybersecurity, elections and the federal government. Prior to that, he has provided award-winning coverage of cybersecurity news across the public and private sectors for various publications since 2017. Derek has a bachelor\u2019s degree in print journalism from Hofstra University in New York and a master\u2019s degree in public policy from George Mason University in Virginia.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Microsoft, along with more than two dozen tech companies, are pressing policymakers to support open-source AI systems and&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":117909,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,4788,1710,25,111,18486,320,14972,2415,361,724,2819],"class_list":["post-117908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-ai","tag-ai-regulation","tag-ai-security","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificial-intelligence-ai","tag-dell","tag-microsoft","tag-mistral-ai","tag-open-source-ai","tag-palantir","tag-perplexity","tag-policy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117908"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117908\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/117909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}