TLDRocket
25 July 2026
The artificial intelligence industry is fracturing along commercial lines. Twenty-five major tech companies—Microsoft, Nvidia, Meta, and others—signed a joint statement this week defending open-weight AI models and the practice of distillation, the technique of compressing expensive models into cheaper ones. Anthropic and OpenAI pointedly did not. The split matters because it reflects real market pressure: Moonshot's Chinese-made Kimi K3 now produces code as good as Anthropic's Claude for one-third the price, four times slower but cheap enough that developers are switching. Chinese models now account for over 30 percent of token usage on some platforms. The open-weights signatories—largely infrastructure providers with no proprietary model to protect—are betting that accessibility drives adoption. The holdouts, built on expensive closed systems, want restrictions.
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