Y Combinator’s Garry Tan Wants US Open-Weight AI Labs to ‘Distill’ Frontier Models, Too
On 10 and 11 September 2026 Y Combinator chief executive Garry Tan told CNBC and TechCrunch that he would “do nothing” about Chinese labs distilling American frontier models, and that smaller American open-weight labs should be free to distill American frontier labs through “an American distillation regime”. We read both interviews, the terms of service of OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, the July open-weights letter that Y Combinator signed, Dario Amodei’s reply to it, Anthropic’s February and September reports, the CISA advisory and Elon Musk’s April testimony, and counted what the front door he describes actually looks like.
