WordPress.org blog: WordPress Signs the Open Weights and American AI Leadership Letter

We’re proud to announce that WordPress has signed Open Weights and American AI Leadership, an open letter asking US policymakers to not place early restrictions on open weight AI models. These are artificial intelligence models that anyone can download, inspect, modify, and run on their own infrastructure. The letter was published on July 24, 2026, and more than 270 companies and organizations have added their names. Its argument will be familiar to anyone who works in open source: technology gets better and safer when more people can study it and build on it.

That belief is the foundation WordPress is built on. Anyone can run the software, look at how it works, change it to suit their needs, and share what they make. Those freedoms are why WordPress has become a foundational part of the open web and why people trust it with their work. Open weight models bring that same kind of access to AI. A model that anyone can download and adapt becomes something people can shape around their own work and improve for everyone who comes after them.

The next generation of innovation won’t come from models alone. It will come from millions of people building with them. Open weights help make that possible. WordPress is proud to support the Open Weights and American AI Leadership letter.

– WordPress Executive Director, Mary Hubbard

Requests to US Policymakers

The requests in the letter are practical ones. As signatories, we ask policymakers to expand access to computing power for startups and researchers, to invest in shared resources like public datasets and evaluation tools, and to keep more than one kind of model available rather than narrowing the field to a handful of closed systems. We also ask that common development practices, such as using one model’s output to improve another, not be treated as theft by default. Each of these requests follows the pattern that has made open source software dependable for decades, where many people test, improve, and secure the same technology in public view.

For more than 20 years, WordPress has run on the idea that the people using a technology should be free to shape it. AI is becoming part of how people publish, and open weight models are one way that freedom carries forward. Keeping them available gives the next generation of builders, the people now learning WordPress, the same starting point that open source gave everyone before them.