Earlier this year, Anthropic sent letters to US lawmakers warning about the practice, formally accusing Chinese firms Moonshot, DeepSeek and MiniMax of industrial-scale distillation of its Claude models.
Illicit distillation “is IP theft and industrial espionage” and “a national challenge that creates serious national security risks for the US and democratic allies”, Sarah Heck, Anthropic’s head of public policy, said on X.
Open-source, or open-weight, models cost less and use source code that programmers can customise – something that is especially appreciated by startups and companies that do not want to be beholden to models from Anthropic, OpenAI or Google that cost money and must be taken as is.
Even if just floated as an idea, the startup community has asked the White House to forgo any plan to block foreign-made open-source models, saying it would just unfairly reward the US AI giants, thwart competition and stick entrepreneurs with high prices for AI.
“Lobbyists are urging Washington to treat open-model AI as a security threat. In fact, it is something more familiar: proper competition that should be welcomed,” wrote Bill Gurley, a former venture capitalist, in The Washington Post.
On Wednesday, a group of 179 startups wrote a letter to the Trump administration urging it to think twice about any outright ban or strict curbs on foreign-made models.
“Denying American startups access to models available abroad would stifle competition, entrench incumbents, and function as a tax on intelligence,” the letter from the Little Tech Association said.
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