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Policymakers should not conflate legitimate model-development techniques with misappropriation: distillation, the practice of using one model's outputs to help train or improve another, is a widely used technique for model improvement, evaluation, and validation that reflects a long tradition of learning from and building upon existing technologies.
The author flags the letter's surprising pro-distillation stance and quotes its argument: distillation is a widely used, legitimate technique rooted in the open-source software tradition, and policymakers should not conflate it with misappropriation. ✦ AI generated
the Open Weights and American AI Leadership letter · Simon Willison's Weblog · 2026-08-02 · original ↗
In shaping this ecosystem, policymakers should be careful not to conflate legitimate model-development techniques with misappropriation. Distillation, or the practice of using one model's outputs to help train or improve another, is a widely used technique for model improvement, evaluation, and validation. It reflects a long tradition of learning from, building upon, and improving existing technologies, a tradition that has helped drive innovation since the rise of the open-source software movement.
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supports → Distillation is a common industry practice, not IP theft, and the real issue is that closed labs like Anthropic could stop it with KYC but choose not to because it would slow their growth.Chamath Palihapitiya · All-In Podcastrebuts → Anthropic, notably absent from the open-weights letter's signatures, published its own response three days later in which CEO Dario Amodei warned of authoritarian governments building AI models more powerful than those of the US and of models being misused for cyberattacks or biological attacks, called for a crackdown on industrial-scale distillation operations, and stated that Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open-weights models.the author · Simon Willison's Weblogextends → The U.S. should pass a law that explicitly makes data collection for training models fair use, and bars terms of service that forbid distillation, at least for U.S. companies.Ben Thompson · Simon Willison's Weblog