Garry Tan wants an 'American distillation regime' and told TechCrunch he'd do nothing about it

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Responding to Anthropic's second threat intelligence report alleging illicit distillation attacks by Chinese labs, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan broke with Dario Amodei's call for a US crackdown. Tan told TechCrunch on 2026-09-11 'I would do nothing' and 'there should be an American distillation regime,' adding that 'controlling what users and customers do with API calls to closed weight models feels constraining.' His argument leans on the frontier labs' own training-data provenance. This is the first named counter-position from a major US startup institution on the story that broke on 09-12.