Why GitLab signed the Open Weights and American AI Leadership letter

This week GitLab signed the Open Weights and American AI Leadership letter, joining a long list of other technology companies that support a strong, open AI ecosystem.

The letter argues that open weights spur innovation, give customers greater control, and provide an important path to AI safety and security. In addition to being a policy position we share, it’s core to how we think about agentic engineering: Teams do their best work when they can choose the right model for the job.

As the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps that enables speed with control for agentic software engineering, GitLab prioritizes customer choice by orchestrating the software lifecycle and supporting multiple models across a team’s workflow.

Empowering customers to choose their AI models

For many organizations, there is an emerging interest in having governed access to best-in-class foundation and open weight models. GitLab supports both.

Foundation models often lead on general-purpose capability, while open weight models can provide benefits for customer control over cost, deployment, and data residency. Our goal is to help customers combine them as needed.

One of the most critical decisions corporate leaders make is how to protect software and strategic IP against security, privacy, and competitive threats. Organizations shouldn't be locked into one cloud or one AI model provider.

GitLab is the only platform that's cloud neutral and AI model neutral. That choice only holds up if the model market stays open. Open weight models give development teams the choice of where to run their AI models — in air-gapped environments if necessary — while keeping control of their code.

Our stance

Like policymakers, we want a safe, secure AI ecosystem, and view openness as an important part of achieving it. We support policies that preserve the ability to develop, distribute, and use open weight models subject to focused, risk-based safeguards and well-targeted tools for addressing genuine misuse. These kinds of interventions can play a meaningful role in fostering a robust ecosystem in which multiple model providers — open and proprietary — can compete on the merits, to the benefit of innovation, security, and customer choice.

Related links

• GitLab AI Transparency Center
• Securing AI together: GitLab's partnership with security researchers
• Why enterprise independence matters more than ever in DevSecOps