Who’s Afraid of Chinese Models?

# Who’s Afraid of Chinese Models? Source: [https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/20/afraid-of-chinese-models/](https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/20/afraid-of-chinese-models/) 20th July 2026 \- Link Blog **[Who’s Afraid of Chinese Models?](https://stratechery.com/2026/whos-afraid-of-chinese-models/)**\([via](https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/20/thompson-chinese-models-distillation)\) 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 — which is literally just querying the API — is nearly impossible; the U\.S\. should go the other way and lean into a new copyright policy that both indemnifies the labs and also guarantees that what they learned fuels further innovation for everyone else\. Ben also theorizes that Alibaba's decision to release Qwen 3\.8 Max as open weights \- a reversal from their decision[not to release Qwen 3\.7 Max](https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.7)in May \- may have been influenced by a[recent speech](http://english.scio.gov.cn/topnews/2026-07/18/content_118605932.html)by Xi Jinping, who said: > We should seize this rare, historic opportunity to encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing\.