Garry Tan: Let American AI Labs Distill Frontier Models, Too

Garry Tan wants US open-weight AI labs to 'distill' frontier models, too

Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan says regulators should do nothing about distillation, the technique Chinese labs use to learn from frontier models. He argues American open-weight labs should be free to distill U.S. frontier models — legally, through the front door — to build a stronger non-Chinese open-weight ecosystem. Tan calls it an overreach for AI labs to control what customers do with their models, noting those same labs trained on copyrighted data without permission.