America has a chip strategy for AI. It doesn’t have an open-source one.
Washington spent billions protecting the hardware layer — the CHIPS Act, a stake in Intel, export controls on Nvidia. But the models the world actually builds on are increasingly coming out of China: DeepSeek, Z.ai’s GLM, Moonshot’s Kimi. Open weights can be downloaded, customized and run on your own servers, and are often cheaper.
Now the pressure is coming from inside American tech. Jensen Huang used his first post on X to publish an open letter urging Washington to treat open-weight AI as a strategic asset — co-signed by some of the biggest AI players, with Anthropic the major holdout.
Meanwhile enterprises are asking a harder question: who owns what the AI learns about your business? Deirdre Bosa tackles the layer of the AI stack Washington isn’t funding.
Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
1:19 Washington’s blind spot
4:27 Who owns your company’s brain?
7:35 The industry picks a side
Anchor and Columnist Deirdre Bosa
Produced by Jasmine Wu
Edited by Andrew Evers, Erin Black
Senior Director of Video Jeniece Pettitt
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America Needs An Open-Source AI Strategy
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