Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wants lower US barriers for open-source artificial intelligence models to better compete with Chinese rivals.
The call came as the social media giant released a new open-weight model on Monday and said it planned to launch more such models soon.
The new model, Muse Glimmer, is much smaller than leading AI models from rivals and is instead designed for agentic tasks and can run on a Mac or PC with a single graphics card, aiming to tap demand for AI systems that run directly on people’s devices.
Open-weight models are typically cheaper than leading models from so-called frontier labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
They also come with publicly accessible core components for easy customisation, unlike closed models that companies keep fully under their control.
Meta’s launch comes as the social media giant seeks to strengthen its position after forming a costly, new superintelligence team in 2025 to propel itself back into the high-stakes AI race.
Zuckerberg’s statement also marks the latest show of support for open-weight AI, which is gaining traction as businesses grow wary of ballooning AI bills and worry about recent cybersecurity incidents involving models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta.
Hugging Face, the AI coding collaboration site that was hacked by a rogue OpenAI model, said in July that it used a Chinese open-weight model to defend against the attack because closed-source models have restrictions on use for cybersecurity work.
Zuckerberg said in a statement that the US needed to rethink policies if domestic firms were to lead in open-weight models.
Chinese startups are leading the race for open-weight models, with Moonshot’s Kimi K3, alongside Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-Max and DeepSeek’s V4-Flash, delivering performance that rivals top systems by US AI labs.
By contrast, the leading models of US developers OpenAI, Anthropic and Alphabet’s Google are closed source.
“Foreign labs currently hold several advantages here since American labs have to comply with many additional restrictions on training data,” Zuckerberg said, referring to open-source models.
“US policy must reduce this additional friction if we want American open source models to lead over time,” Zuckerberg said, adding that restricting access to foreign open-source models was not an effective solution.
US President Donald Trump’s administration told AI developers earlier in August it will not put open-weight AI models through voluntary safety tests, according to two sources familiar with the discussions.
In his statement, Zuckerberg also advocated for AI model distillation, or using a powerful AI system to train a smaller model.
He said Meta would implement a governance structure to give its independent directors the power to approve the safety criteria for releasing models.
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