GoKawiilBig quote: Jensen Huang just spent a week watching his company's valuation get hit by the threat of a Chinese open-weight model. His response was to go on the record defending it. Speaking to Axios in Fort Worth, Texas, at the opening of a new phase of the Wistron plant that builds Nvidia's AI infrastructure, the Nvidia CEO said American companies should "absolutely" be free to run Chinese models. "These Chinese models are excellent," he said. "Open-source models that are excellent should be used." Asked whether China could displace American labs, he was blunt: "Zero possibility."
The timing is what makes it interesting. Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 on July 16. Independent evaluators put it third on Artificial Analysis' Intelligence Index, only behind Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol, and first on LMArena's blind Frontend Code Arena board.
The market took it about as well as it took DeepSeek. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell 12.5% in a week, its worst stretch in 15 months. Taiwan's benchmark dropped more than 6%, Japan closed down 4%, and Chinese AI stocks actually got hit harder than American ones, with Zhipu down as much as 30% in Hong Kong and MiniMax off 16%.
"The market misunderstood the impact of DeepSeek the first time," Huang told Axios, adding that Wall Street has "misunderstood the impact of Kimi again this time."
His pitch is one Nvidia has made before, delivered without much subtlety this time: "Free AI should be great for hardware. Free AI should be great for chips. Free AI should be great for data centers." The logic is that as cheap, capable models get used more, not less, more usage means more chips running somewhere. He also argued open models don't cannibalize OpenAI and Anthropic, but they give people a free first taste, and plenty of those people end up paying for something faster and more reliable.
Bloomberg's analysis of K3 noted that where DeepSeek's story was about cheaper training, Moonshot's is about a much larger model that leans harder on memory infrastructure.
The security argument, flipped
Huang waved off the idea that a downloaded Chinese model is some kind of backdoor to Beijing, pointing out you can inspect the weights, tweak them, and run the whole thing sealed off from the internet if you want. His argument is that openness actually makes things safer, because more people are looking for problems. Lock everything into one closed system, he said, and "if everything just becomes one single model, one single point of attack, one single source of failure, I think the world is much, much more vulnerable."
Then he turned that same logic on an American company. Huang said Anthropic should open up Claude Mythos, its cybersecurity model that's currently restricted to a vetted group of partners, calling it something that "should be available as a service" and arguing "holding Anthropic back is not in the benefit of the United States." His framing: "Just because Mythos is not available, open models are available anyhow."
It is worth noting that Nvidia is one of the partners with access to Mythos already, through Anthropic's Project Glasswing program. Glasswing has grown from around 50 partners to roughly 200 across about 15 countries, and Anthropic has said models this capable will likely be widely available within 6 to 12 months regardless of what it decides.
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