Garry Tan, president and CEO of Y Combinator, spoke on September 10 at the accelerator’s Demo Day to criticize efforts to regulate open-weight AI. He stated he would take no action against Chinese firms DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax, accused by a joint advisory from the NSA, FBI, and CISA of distilling outputs from OpenAI and Anthropic models. Tan defended distillation as an inevitable byproduct of building powerful AI on public data, arguing that frontier labs should preserve their competitive advantage through pricing rather than regulatory moats. Of Y Combinator’s latest batch of 196 startups, 149 (76%) were machine learning or AI ventures.
Source: Read the original article
