Aug 10 (Reuters) - Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg called

for lower U.S. barriers for open-source AI models to compete

with Chinese rivals as the social media giant released a new

open-weight model on Monday.

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.

It 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.

Open-weight models are typically cheaper than leading models

from so-called frontier labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic.

Open-weight models also come with publicly accessible core

components for easy customization, unlike closed models that

companies keep fully under their control.

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.

"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.

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)