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There's been a rapid increase in political chatter on the need to stop AI distillation "attacks". I've been following this area closely, especially early legislation, as I see it being an area where initial action has pretty big unintended second order consequences.
At face value, I see the desire to ban Chinese models built on distillation (e.g. via entity listing or other interventions). I agree that the strength of leading AI companies, particularly OpenAI and Anthropic, is a massive strategic asset for the country. The argument is that distillation limits their competitive position, where Chinese labs use distillation to "steal" capabilities and undercut them on price.
But, on balance so long as these distilled models are released openly with permissive licenses, the US AI ecosystem benefits massively by accessing them. The U.S. has by far and away the biggest inference market, and having the option of cheaper, specialized open models to counterweight the best closed models is an excellent economic equilibrium driving investment and innovation at the frontier. We do not want to kneecap this dynamic in the middle of one of the most incredible times of rapid model progress.
To state the core of my worry clearly – we don't have clear evidence on the exact benefits Chinese companies gain from distillation. We have some evidence on HOW distillation data is accessed, only from the same companies likely championing this policy action. This doesn't map cleanly to impact. Some experts think distillation is becoming less relevant in the era of RL environments as training data, some others think distillation is becoming easier. We need to know the true effects before we consider siloing the US AI ecosystem out of the global, open ecosystem.
Flourishing startups like Cursor use these open-weight models as a central method for pushing their long-term independence in the ecosystem. Also, a large majority of academic research in the U.S. is built on Chinese models right now. Banning the Chinese open weight models right now will result in massive consolidation of power onto the closed AI labs right when the open ecosystem in the US is starting to explore and blossom more.
I worry it could be a sort of 6-12month delay in capability rollout of open models if such a ban was enacted, and long term make the open ecosystem not really viable. The open ecosystem is currently very fragile, supported by a few model builders.
At the same time, lots of weird effects globally could follow this ban, where the US may not play a role in the global open model ecosystem.
So if people want to discuss this more, happy to try and help. I think the interdependencies in the ecosystem aren't well communicated.
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