Republican Senator Jim Banks is urging the Trump administration to develop incentives to encourage US tech companies to build open-weight AI models, according to a letter released on Friday that adds to a growing debate over the industry's future.

Open-weight models are AI systems with publicly accessible core elements — examples include Meta's Muse Glimmer, Nvidia's Nemotron and startup Thinking Machines' Inkling. Users can download and fine-tune them for specific tasks, and they can be cheaper for cost-conscious customers. Closed-weight tools such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini are generally regarded as more capable, but their creators retain control over their components.

Banks, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, asked President Donald Trump's administration to devise options to 'limit dependence' on Chinese-made open-weight models, which are becoming increasingly popular in the US and prompting security concerns in Washington. He also said the US government must make it harder for Chinese firms to use American semiconductors to build their 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 a letter to Trump's economic adviser Christopher Phelan.

The letter joins a debate that has split the tech industry. Nvidia and Meta, joined by dozens of US tech companies and venture capital firms, urged policymakers in July not to restrict open-weight AI, arguing it fuels innovation. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, by contrast, has said open-weight models could present a security risk, since it is harder to monitor how they are used once weights are public.

Sources