Y Combinator’s Garry Tan wants US open-weight AI labs to ‘distill’ frontier models, too
By Pradhyuman,
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan said regulators should not restrict AI distillation. In an interview with CNBC, Tan proposed that U.S. open-weight AI labs distill knowledge from frontier models to create American open-weight options. Distillation happens when a developer repeatedly prompts an existing model to learn its reasoning and capabilities.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei asked U.S. regulators to ban distillation, pointing to an Anthropic report that claims Chinese labs use stolen credentials to distill frontier models. Tan told TechCrunch that closed-weight AI labs trained their own models on public data without copyright permission. He stated that restricting how customers use API output is constraining and argued model output should act as a public good. Tan told CNBC that the primary threat to AI is a single monolithic company gaining exclusive control over capital and research.
Maintained by Pradhyuman.
Filed under: Anthropic, Models & Research, Policy & Safety