Therefore it is no surprise that both companies are among the signatories.
The motivation of Palantir is very transparent, they have launched a product created in cooperation with NVIDIA, which is a turnkey system (Sovereign AI) that includes all hardware (i.e. a rack with servers full of NVIDIA GPUs) and all software needed by a company to run on its premises LLM inference and also training/fine tuning.
Thus the Palantir product competes with OpenAI and Anthropic and it benefits from the existence of open weights LLMs.
The motivation of Microsoft is more obscure for now, but because its criticism was very similar to that of Palantir, about how dangerous it is for corporations to delegate the processing of their AI needs to external entities like OpenAI and Anthropic, I assume that Microsoft is also going to propose an alternative to using remotely the OpenAI and Anthropic APIs.
Unlike Palantir, Microsoft is not likely to suggest self-hosting on premises, but I suppose that they might promote self-hosting on some kind of instances rented from Azure.
Yeah, Microsoft wants to sell Azure compute. They also want to sell their upcoming surface ultra hardware with the Nvidia chip in it. They preached hard on "unmetered intelligence" at this year's BUILD conference, went hard on local AI, and Azure Foundry, Windows Foundry Local, etc.
Copilot, both GH and M365, are also made to be model agnostic. Microsoft sells enterprise services and software, they'd prefer (I'm assuming) to not be locked in and dependent on any 1 or 2 model providers and would prefer plenty of options and competition in that space because they can just easily offer a model agnostic harness, integrated with the rest of their stack.
AI models don’t really have nationality. They don’t have race/ethnicity fields on their model cards. It’s impossible to determine the country of origin of a model by looking at their weights. There is no DNA test for AIs. They exist in a mathematical space where human-made borders make no sense.
This means IF there is a regulation for open weight models, it has to apply to ALL open weight models. There is no any other option, since you can always train/fine-tune a model to change it’s weights and rebrand it as a new model.
How much of that is organic versus something a agitprop agent is commenting in places like HN would be interesting to know, but people very much talk about that from a nationality perspective.
(a) sellers of hardware (Nvidia, IBM) and those who rent hardware out to others (Amazon, Microsoft)
They want open models because they don't have to license it to run it on their hardware, so they can offer lower cost and inspect what they are offering to clients
(b) open model creators (Arcee, Perplexity, Mistral, IBM, Microsoft)
...who would be unable to work if open-weight models are banned
(c) Software-heavy companies ( Mozilla, The Linux Foundation , ServiceNow, Microsoft, IBM, heck all of them)
...who want models that are cheap to run because that reduces the cost of running an LLM (whether you are trying to replace a software developer or just assist them, the value of a reduced cost LLM is directionally the same)
MS is playing literally all the sides in this whole AI thing. They are a massive investor in oAI, and have lots of rights to use their models for a long time. They also have the cloud where they offer inference w/ all the benefits of already being there, data retention, etc. They also have a research wing that can build models (rumours are they're aiming for frontier-ish). I don't think there's currently an angle in this AI thing that MS hasn't aimed for.
OpenAI and Anthropic can bring American open-weight model providers like Meta to court but not the Chinese. Chinese companies breaking American IP law (whether the law is correct or not) are basically immune. This has been going on forever, I guess enough is at stake finally for the federal government to care.