Who’s Afraid of Chinese Models?
Who’s Afraid of Chinese Models? Interesting proposal from Ben Thompson that both addresses the hypocrisy of labs outlawing distillation against their models despite training on unlicensed data, and could help US open models compete more effectively with their Chinese counterparts: The U.S. should pass a law that (1) makes explicit that collecting data for training models is fair use, and (2) bars terms of service that forbid distillation, for U.S. companies at a minimum. Stopping distillation —
Record details
Published: 20 July 2026
Source: Simon Willisons Weblog
Category: Field notes
Topics: Regulation · Copyright & IP
Retrieved: 21 July 2026
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ethics.ai (20 July 2026), “Who’s Afraid of Chinese Models?,” evidence record 12055, https://ethics.ai/record/12055 (originally published by Simon Willisons Weblog).
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