# Y Combinator's Garry Tan wants US open-weight AI labs to 'distill' frontier models, too

> Y Combinator president Garry Tan is urging smaller, American open-weight AI labs to borrow a page from their Chinese rivals and distill the big US frontier models, training compact open systems that learn from the outputs of the strongest closed ones. The goal, as he frames it, is national: give the United States a deep bench of capable open-weight models that are not controlled by Chinese labs. Distillation has been the not so secret ingredient behind several fast improving Chinese open models, and it has been controversial precisely because it lets a follower capture much of a leader's capability at a fraction of the cost. Tan's pitch flips that anxiety into strategy, arguing the US should treat the technique as a competitive tool rather than a threat. The idea sits at the messy intersection of open source ideals, geopolitics, and the terms of service of the very labs being distilled, and it hints at how the open-weight fight is becoming a matter of industrial policy.

_Section: [Daily AI Updates](https://www.wortins.com/daily-ai) · Source: TechCrunch · Published Saturday, September 12, 2026_

## Wortins' read

Y Combinator president Garry Tan is urging smaller, American open-weight AI labs to borrow a page from their Chinese rivals and distill the big US frontier models, training compact open systems that learn from the outputs of the strongest closed ones. The goal, as he frames it, is national: give the United States a deep bench of capable open-weight models that are not controlled by Chinese labs. Distillation has been the not so secret ingredient behind several fast improving Chinese open models, and it has been controversial precisely because it lets a follower capture much of a leader's capability at a fraction of the cost. Tan's pitch flips that anxiety into strategy, arguing the US should treat the technique as a competitive tool rather than a threat. The idea sits at the messy intersection of open source ideals, geopolitics, and the terms of service of the very labs being distilled, and it hints at how the open-weight fight is becoming a matter of industrial policy.

## Source

[Read the full story at TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/11/y-combinators-garry-tan-wants-u-s-open-weight-ai-labs-to-distill-frontier-models-too/)

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