The Great AI Double Standard

Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash🍕 I’m JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you like ideas that take their time, you’re in the right place.While you’re here, a few things I’ve built: Kerouac, a writing app | Post Through It, a solo microblogging tool | Distributism.ai, my MCP platform | Laterware, all the AI news you need | Studio Self, a thought leadership agency for founders x VCs.You can buy my book Permissionless here.The US AI companies are screaming about distillation. (Again.) To OpenAI and Anthropic, the idea of an open-source or Chinese AI company building their own AI by querying Claude, ChatGPT, etc is abhorrent - it’s a form of theft, taking that which doth not belong to them.But there’s a deep hypocrisy at work here, and I don’t think it takes a highly developed moral compass to find it. The US frontier companies built their own models on the entire corpus of human knowledge; they trained on books,…