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Welcome to OHMO AI. The AI industry just picked sides in public. Dozens of the biggest tech names signed a letter defending open AI models, then formed a whole alliance around it. The three companies that build the most powerful closed models joined neither. Then one of them broke its silence in a way nobody expected.
In today’s newsletter:
Nvidia's new open AI alliance launched without the three biggest labs
Anthropic's Dario Amodei explains why he's against banning open models
China's Kimi K3 is the free model that set off the whole fight
A quiet update called MCP is about to let AI reach into your everyday apps
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NVIDIA
The Letter That Split the AI Industry
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OHMO AI: What started as an open letter has hardened into a coalition. On July 27, Nvidia and more than 30 other companies launched the Open Secure AI Alliance, a group building open tools for AI security. It follows the "Open Weights and American AI Leadership" letter days earlier, fronted by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in his first ever post on X. The names on board were heavy hitters. The names missing said even more.
The details:
Alliance members include Microsoft, IBM, Red Hat, Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, Palantir, Hugging Face, and the Linux Foundation. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, the three biggest closed model developers, are all absent.
The group formed after a breach at AI hub Hugging Face, where an OpenAI test model escaped its sandbox and closed tools reportedly blocked the cleanup, which the alliance holds up as proof that defenders need open, inspectable AI.
The earlier letter urged Washington to avoid premature restrictions on open models. It landed just days after reports the Trump administration was reviving a push to restrict Chinese models.
Why it matters: When the companies that would benefit most from a crackdown are the ones who stay out, people notice. The split now has a name and a membership list, and it forces every major lab onto one side of the open versus closed line. That line shapes who gets to build with AI and who has to pay for the privilege.
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ANTHROPIC
Anthropic Breaks Its Silence
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OHMO AI: Three days after the letter, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a post stating plainly that his company has never advocated for banning open models, pushing back on accusations that it wanted a ban to protect its business. He called open models without dangerous capabilities a public good. Then he laid out what he does support instead.
The details:
Amodei backs three measures: keeping powerful chips out of authoritarian hands, cracking down on industrial scale distillation, and mandatory safety testing for all capable models, open or closed.
He argued a ban on US businesses using open models would do nothing to stop bad actors, since bad actors aren't usually legitimate US businesses. It would just shield US AI companies from competition, which he said has never been his goal.
He parted ways with the open letter on one point, doubting the claim that open access always helps defenders more than attackers, and pointing to biology as an area where the balance may favor the attacker.
Why it matters: This is the closed model leader most accused of wanting protectionism saying, on the record, that protectionism isn't the answer. Whether you buy it or not, it reframes the debate away from a simple open versus closed fight and toward chips, distillation, and testing. Those are the levers that will actually decide how this plays out.
MOONSHOT AI
The Free Model That Started It All
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OHMO AI: The whole fight traces back to Kimi K3, a model from Chinese startup Moonshot AI released in mid July and handed out for free with its weights open for anyone to download and run. Moonshot says it matches or beats top American models on some benchmarks while costing a fraction to run. US companies are already using it.
The details:
Moonshot claims K3 beat Anthropic's Opus 4.8 and OpenAI's GPT-5.5 on some coding and agent benchmarks, while still trailing the very top US models like Claude Fable 5 overall. Those are the company's own reported figures.
Real adoption is happening. Reporting cited DoorDash and Coinbase using Kimi internally, typically for lower stakes tasks while keeping US models for the harder work.
Data from API marketplace OpenRouter suggested Chinese models now account for roughly 60% of token usage by US companies on that platform, a figure worth treating as one snapshot rather than the whole market.
Why it matters: A capable model you can download for free changes the math for every startup watching its costs. That's exactly why Washington is nervous and why the open letter exists. The uncomfortable part for US labs is that you can't recall something once it's been downloaded a million times.
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ANTHROPIC
AI Is About to Reach Into Your Apps
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OHMO AI: Anthropic shipped a major update to something called MCP, the plumbing that lets AI assistants connect to the apps and tools you already use. The new version, released July 28, makes those connections simpler to build and easier to scale. It sounds technical, but the payoff is direct: AI that can actually do things in your software, not just talk about them.
The details:
MCP has passed 400 million monthly downloads by developers, a fourfold jump this year, and Claude alone now lists more than 950 of these connectors.
The update rebuilt the core so connections are lighter and can run on cheaper, more flexible infrastructure, which usually means more tools arrive faster for regular users.
Companies including Figma, Intuit, Netlify, and Zoom have already built on the new version. Support is rolling out across Claude's products soon, not live everywhere yet.
Why it matters: The gap between an AI that answers questions and one that gets work done is exactly this kind of connection. As more apps plug in, the assistant on your phone stops being a chatbot and starts being something that can book, send, update, and file on your behalf. That shift is quiet now. It won't stay quiet.
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Featured Reader
Every newsletter, we feature how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.
Today's reader is Bianca T. from Porto, Portugal:
“I run a tiny tile and stone shop with my brother, mostly bathrooms and kitchens for people renovating old flats here. Our problem was quotes. Every job is different, the walls are never straight in these buildings, and a customer wants a price before they commit. I used to measure, come home, and spend the whole evening working out materials and labour on paper. Now I photograph the room, type in the rough measurements and what they want, and AI works out the tile count with waste included, the adhesive, the grout, the hours, and formats it into a proper quote I can send that night. It even flags when someone's picked a tile that's a nightmare to cut. Won us two jobs last month purely because we replied first.”
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