Y Combinator’s Garry Tan advocates for open-weight AI labs, pushes back on distillation crackdown

Garry Tan, president and CEO of Y Combinator, used the stage at the accelerator’s Demo Day to deliver a pointed message to regulators: leave open-weight AI alone. Speaking on September 10, Tan argued that frontier AI models, built on the bedrock of public human knowledge, should function as “a form of public good.” The timing was deliberate, arriving just days after a joint advisory from the NSA, FBI, and CISA flagged alleged large-scale model distillation efforts by Chinese companies. Tan’s response to that advisory was essentially a shrug. He said he would “do nothing” about Chinese firms like DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax reportedly distilling outputs from models built by OpenAI and Anthropic. Rather than treating distillation as an existential threat, he framed it as an inevitable byproduct of building powerful AI on publicly available data. Open weights over closed gates Tan urged regulators to strike a balance that preserves “freedom and access” in AI development. His argument is that clamping down on distillation, the process of training smaller models to mimic the behavior of larger ones, would ultimately hurt the broader ecosystem more than it would protect any single...