Nvidia’s Open Source Alliance Snubs OpenAI and Anthropic

Published 30 July 2026 · tech

Brian Barrett: Oh, I remember Sam. Leah Feiger: Exactly. It's a fun reunion for all. It's this fascinating thing where people already had their preconceived

Brian Barrett: Oh, I remember Sam. Leah Feiger: Exactly. It's a fun reunion for all. It's this fascinating thing where people already had their preconceived, I'm kind of out here to blame China for a lot of regulatory issues. I'm out here to encourage US innovation. And then I'm out here to make a name for myself. How do you get involved in this? This is the topic of the moment. How do you make your mark? Zoë Schiffer: It's so interesting. The distillation thing was really catching my eye. We talked about Moonshot AI's latest model coming out K3, I think it's called, and these immediate allegations that they had distilled models from top US labs. And then I was really struck by multiple Kimi researchers on X making jokes being like, "Oh yeah, within two weeks we distilled Fable." That's not even technically possible. As usual, AI drama plays out on X. I mean, the thing about that is we do have very good evidence that Chinese AI labs were distilling US models. There were times where you would talk to those Chinese open models and they would respond as clawed.

I think that that evidence is pretty sound. Whether they did it this time around, I'm not sure, but it does feel like the US government has gotten involved in this debate pretty late. It's like a lot of this has already happened. It's not to say they shouldn't take action necessarily, but I'm a little bit curious. One, technically speaking, how do you plan to do that? I mean, it doesn't seem like necessarily sanctioning the labs would be that effective in terms of distillation. And then two, is it genuinely too late or can you stop significant distillation or "IP theft" from happening going forward? Brian Barrett: I'll say though, I will say we have seen some movement even this week, right? The FCC has banned the import of foreign-made power inverter models, which is important for data center building. They've banned foreign-made humanoid robots, which is going to be huge. That's where China is leading the US. So, we haven't gotten to the point where they're doing other things, but they are taking steps and they do have some levers they can pull.

I just want to add one more note on this whole conversation, which is we record this on Wednesday afternoon Eastern Time. And as we're talking now, Sam Altman is on Capitol Hill shaking hands, kissing babies, talking to senators, telling them why his AI models are good and not bad actually. So, we'll see if that turns into anything probably if they're just listening to the last voice they hear. Over the weekend, people were just surprised to discover that some chats that they had had with Claude could actually be found via search on the web. You could go to Google and you can search, put in a specific search term to find shared Claude chats, and it would show them back to you. You could go through several hundred of these at least. Google has been taking them down since then. But just to understand how this happened, basically Anthropic lets you share a Claude chat via what's known as a snapshot URL. It's basically if you want to share a specific conversation with somebody, it'll make a link for you and you can send that link to that person and they can look over it.