According to reports, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan publicly stated that U.S. regulators should not interfere with AI distillation practices and believes U.S. open-weight labs should also adopt distillation techniques to learn from cutting-edge closed-source models, forming an "American distillation mechanism" to provide more open-weight alternatives independent of China. Distillation refers to the process of training one model by leveraging extensive prompts to mimic another model's reasoning capabilities, a practice widely recognized as legitimate within the industry for model training.

Tan emphasized that he does not advocate for illicit distillation involving stolen credentials, but rather hopes U.S. labs can access models through legitimate "front-door" entry points. He also argues that leading labs should not restrict users' usage of model outputs, noting that closed-source models themselves were trained using vast amounts of human knowledge without explicit permission. In response to Anthropic's recent report alleging "illicit distillation attacks" by Chinese labs and its CEO Dario Amodei's call for regulatory crackdowns, Tan holds a differing view. He stated that the true AI doomsday scenario is when frontier AI capabilities are monopolized by a single proprietary entity.