Really feels like the govt + industry, through protectionism and fear-mongering, are propping up a "Too big to fail" situation.

Long term, I think the best thing the economy could do is to make training on model outputs fair-use, as suggested by Ben Thompson[1]. Short of that, the companies should enter into distillation agreements with other US labs to let them make near-Fable models.

As it stands now, the companies want to hold all the upside. While also being culturally so safety focused - "only we have the right to regulate this" that its IMO counterproductive to US leadership in AI.

A different universe where X.ai, Meta, and everyone were also building Fable competitive open weights models - because they can distill - would probably be better for the US long term. But there's too much capital on the line right now behind OpenAI / Anthropic for them to do this.

They're really in a bind IMO.

1 - http://stratechery.com/2026/whos-afraid-of-chinese-models/

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delecti 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> Long term, I think the best thing the economy could do is to make training on model outputs fair-use

AI outputs have been ruled as not even copyrightable, isn't that even better than fair use?

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softwaredoug 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Probably - The issue is more about terms-of-service and whether any company wants to go to bat on a years-long legal battle over this issue

	▲	delecti 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well that's a big of a separate issue. You aren't violating copyright law to use the output of one LLM to train your own, but that doesn't mean they need to let you do it. You likewise aren't violating Apple's copyright if you use iTunes to make a missile, but Apple doesn't have to let you do it. (Example chosen because that carveout is/was in their EULA)