Y Combinator's Garry Tan Wants US Open-Weight Labs to Distill American Frontier Models the Way Chinese Labs Do

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Tan argued that smaller American open-weight labs should use distillation against US frontier models to build a domestic open-weight tier that is not dependent on Chinese releases. It is an unusual public position because the same technique is what US labs describe as theft when Chinese labs are accused of it, and Anthropic published on detecting distillation attacks two days earlier. The unresolved question he is pushing on is whether US labs would tolerate sanctioned domestic distillation or treat it identically to the foreign case.