Who’s Afraid of Chinese Models?
Ben Thompson proposes US law legalizing AI training data collection and distillation to compete with China
“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.”
Ben Thompson argues the US should legalize training data collection as fair use and ban anti-distillation ToS clauses, calling out the hypocrisy of labs restricting distillation while training on unlicensed data. Separately, Alibaba reversed course and released Qwen 3.8 Max as open weights after initially withholding Qwen 3.7 Max, with Thompson theorizing Xi Jinping's public call for open-source AI sharing may have influenced the decision. The piece frames US open-model competitiveness against Chinese counterparts as a policy problem as much as a technical one.