Y Combinator’s Garry Tan wants US open-weight AI labs to ‘distill’ frontier models, too
September 12, 2026
When it comes to Chinese AI labs using distillation techniques to extract knowledge from frontier model makers, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan is hoping regulators stay out of it. In fact, he thinks U.S. AI labs should perhaps play the same game.
“I would do nothing,” he told CNBC in an interview earlier this week. “We could argue that there should be an American distillation…