Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan wants US open-weight AI labs to distill frontier models. "I would do nothing," he told CNBC, adding, "We could argue that there should be an American distillation regime." He elaborated to TechCrunch that smaller American open-weight AI labs should use the same training techniques on American frontier AI labs, giving the US a more robust set of open-weight options that aren't Chinese.

Distillation is when a model maker extensively prompts another model to learn how it works and reasons. It is commonly, and legitimately, used by AI labs to help train new models. Anthropic this week released its second report alleging that Chinese labs are engaged in "illicit distillation attacks," hiding their identities to distill without permission and relying on fraud and stolen credentials. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had previously publicly called on US regulators to crack down on distillation.

Tan isn't advocating for American AI labs to use stolen credentials to distill. He wants them to be free to come in the front door. His argument is twofold: it's an overreach for AI labs to dictate what their customers can do with the information their models share, and the proprietary AI labs didn't ask permission when they vacuumed up human knowledge to train their models.

"Controlling what users and customers do with API calls to closed weight models feels constraining," he told TechCrunch. Tan wants a balance between open-weight AI labs and frontier labs. To him, the true AI doomer scenario is for all the immense power of frontier AI to wind up in the hands of a single powerful, proprietary provider. "The nightmare scenario, the doomer scenario for AI is that there's just one company," he said.