Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan Advocates Against Restricting Model Distillation by Chinese Firms

Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan stated at the annual Demo Day that he chooses to take no action regarding the distillation of frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic by Chinese companies such as DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax. Tan suggested that regulators should focus on maintaining a commercial balance between open-weight and frontier models. He also expressed skepticism toward AI doomsday scenarios, identifying cybersecurity as the most urgent risk, and noted that the economic and employment impacts of AI will take decades to fully manifest.