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/