https://www.live-feeds.com/feed/y-combinator-s-garry-tan-says-do-nothing-about-distillation-as-ai-giants-accuse-china-of-copying-their-techContinuously updated, source-cited coverage. https://www.live-feeds.com/feed/y-combinator-s-garry-tan-says-do-nothing-about-distillation-as-ai-giants-accuse-china-of-copying-their-techhttps://www.live-feeds.com/feed/y-combinator-s-garry-tan-says-do-nothing-about-distillation-as-ai-giants-accuse-china-of-copying-their-tech#u70564Wed, 16 Sep 2026 14:01:23 +0000Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan argues that regulators should not intervene in AI model distillation. This position follows accusations from Anthropic that Chinese firms Moonshot and DeepSeek stole technology by secretly diverting user requests to Claude to train their own models. Tan maintains that US open-weight AI labs should use these distillation techniques to stay competitive, while Anthropic seeks a crackdown on what it describes as illegal distillation practices.Why it mattersDistillation involves prompting a frontier model to generate data used to train a smaller, separate model. This crea https://www.live-feeds.com/feed/y-combinator-s-garry-tan-says-do-nothing-about-distillation-as-ai-giants-accuse-china-of-copying-their-techhttps://www.live-feeds.com/feed/y-combinator-s-garry-tan-says-do-nothing-about-distillation-as-ai-giants-accuse-china-of-copying-their-tech#u66659Sun, 13 Sep 2026 02:22:38 +0000Y Combinator's Garry Tan advocates for US open-weight AI labs to distill frontier models, arguing against restrictions despite accusations from AI giants. Anthropic claims Chinese labs Moonshot and DeepSeek secretly diverted user requests to Claude and used millions of exchanges to train their own models. While Anthropic views this as theft of technology, Tan suggests US developers should employ similar distillation techniques to remain competitive. This creates a divide between frontier model providers seeking to protect proprietary data and open-weight advocates pushing for broader acce