Y Combinator CEO: "No need to take action" on China's distillation of US AI models

According to CNBC, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan said at YC’s annual Demo Day that in response to Chinese companies—including DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax—distilling OpenAI and Anthropic’s models, he chose to “do nothing,” advising regulators to instead focus on maintaining the commercial balance between open-weight models and frontier models. Tan also expressed reservations about AI doomerism, noting that cybersecurity remains the most pressing risk today, while the employment disruption and economic transformations driven by AI will take decades to truly permeate society.