Y Combinator’s Garry Tan wants U.S. open-weight AI labs to ‘distill’ frontier models, too

TechCrunch · Julie Bort · 11 September 2026, 20:59 ● Covered by 21 sources

Garry Tan said regulators should stay out of distillation and argued that U.S. open-weight AI labs should be allowed to distill frontier models. He specifically called for an “American distillation regime.” This would broaden the set of permitted open-weight options in the U.S., aiming to prevent frontier model power from concentrating in a single proprietary provider.

Why it matters

Tan argues that frontier models themselves trained on public human knowledge so access to capable AI should be "a form of public good."