Garry Tan wants US labs to distill frontier models

Tan argued American open-weight AI labs should distill US frontier models to build a domestic tier independent of Chinese releases, TechCrunch reported September 11. Without one, developers who want open-weight models default to releases out of China, the dependency Tan wants to end. The technique he's endorsing is the same one American labs call theft when Chinese labs are accused of using it against them.

Y Combinator's CEO framed distillation as the fastest way to a domestic open-weight tier that doesn't depend on releases out of China. Anthropic published research on detecting distillation two days before Tan's comments surfaced, work built to catch the copying he's now recommending in the US.

TechCrunch's report doesn't say whether any frontier lab has responded to Tan's proposal. It also doesn't say whether they'd tolerate sanctioned domestic distillation while still treating the same technique as theft when it comes from overseas. Tan didn't name which labs should attempt it, either.