Aug 10 (Reuters) - Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg called for lower U.S. barriers for open-source AI models to better compete with Chinese rivals as the social media giant released a new open-weight model on Monday and said it plans 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 customization, 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 last year 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 last month that it used a Chinese open-weight model to defend against the attack because closed-source models have restrictions on use for cybersecurity work.
Shares of Meta, which have fallen about 10% so far this year, were up 1% in premarket trading on Monday.
POLICY RETHINK NEEDED TO PROPEL OPEN-WEIGHT
Zuckerberg said in a statement that the U.S. 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 U.S. AI labs. By contrast, the leading models of U.S. 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.
"U.S. 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.
U.S. President Donald Trump's administration told AI developers earlier this month that 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 that Meta would implement a governance structure to give its independent directors the power to approve the safety criteria for releasing models.
(Reporting by Ananya Palyekar and Shubham Kalia in Bengaluru; Editing by Mrigank Dhaniwala and Devika Syamnath)
