Because U.S. open weight model makers must obey frontier labs' terms of service barring distillation, they end up worse than Chinese alternatives and distill Chinese models instead — the U.S. should legalize training-data collection as fair use and bar anti-distillation terms of service.

Thompson argues distillation gives Chinese labs a recurring structural edge over Western open-weight makers bound by frontier labs' anti-distillation terms, and calls for U.S. policy change to fix this. ✦ AI generated

Ben Thompson · Stratechery · 2026-07-20 · original ↗

This is a point that bears repeating: because U.S. open weight model makers must follow the frontier labs' terms of service, they (1) are worse than Chinese alternatives and (2) end up distilling the distillation, just with a detour through Chinese labs. Wouldn't it be better if western open weight model makers could go to the source?

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