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The 2 things people need to remember: 1) China can (and does) use the models to influence the west. They train in false information about Taiwan and Hong Kong.
by ballon_monkey 2mo ago
The 2 things people need to remember:
1) China can (and does) use the models to influence the west. They train in false information about Taiwan and Hong Kong. Or pretend like history is in favor of China.
2) Ignoring the models containing false information, they are incredible. But you should be scared of running inference via the model creators directly. If you think your data is safe compared to running it via model providers in the US ( either frontier or model hosts like fireworks.ai ) then please let me know your bank details so I can poke around.
- Jackpillar 2mo ago"Or pretend like history is in favor of China." What does this even mean?
- inigyou 2mo agoLike it will tell you the PRC (current China) was right to go to civil war with ROC (former China, current Taiwan)
- bigyabai 2mo ago1) I'm not using AI to bicker over fringe political shibboleths. 2) I don't think it is any more or less safe to put my code on a Chinese server versus an American one. A Chinese provider also isn't liable to spy on me for the feds, as OpenAI and Anthropic certainly do.
- sanex 2mo agoDifferent county different feds both spying I'm sure.
- margalabargala 2mo agoSure but if you are not Chinese or in China, then the chances of negative consequences to you from the Chinese feds is vanishingly small due to lack of ability to do anything that affects you. Meanwhile if you are in the US, DHS has already subpoenaed social media sites looking for people who made anti-ICE posts and I can't imagine they consider subpoenaing AI conversations off limits https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/dhs-anti-ice-social-media.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/dhs-anti-ice-s...
- hnfong 2mo agoAlso the US government has defacto extra-territorial jurisdiction due to the willingness of allied countries (i.e. most of the developed world) to extradite. Of course only applies when they really want to get you, but that's still a risk.
- cesarb 2mo agoAs a less extreme example: consider how many non-USA hosts say they follow the DMCA.
- margalabargala 2mo agoThe chances of a foreign country extraditing you (or the US requesting extradition) over social media posts is for now quite low, fortunately, though you're right. Broader point being, in general if a country's federal police are going to be spying on you, if you get to pick the country you should pick the one in which you do not reside and don't plan to visit. For a typical US citizen who is not an intelligence target, the chances of negative consequences from China spying on them is way lower than the chances of negative consequences from the FBI spying on them, simply because the FBI will have nonzero false positives.
- walrus01 2mo ago> 1) China can (and does) use the models to influence the west. They train in false information about Taiwan and Hong Kong. Or pretend like history is in favor of China. One of the interesting things is that through a fairly rudimentary process which is being done by 3rd party amateurs who've downloaded the open models, models like Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B (or 27B) can be fully 'uncensored' when turned into GGUF files. I have an uncensored Q8 version of Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B here that will very happily output information about Tiananmen Square, Uyghurs, human rights in China, or indeed can even be instructed to write an intentionally absurd vitriolic screed against the CCP. The same uncensored 27B (dense) will do the same, just at a slower token/s rate. Similarly there's 'uncensored' variants of Gemma4 31B and other western trained models, which once put through the same process, will also discuss or write just about anything you want, bypassing whatever internal guard rails were attempted in the training data set. edit: more concerning, and a very legit concern, is that a model is only as good as the sum total of its training dataset, so if something is trained on a steady diet of news sources like Peoples Daily, Xinhuanet and similar in the English language, then it'll have a greater percentage of CCP-approved media publications in its training dataset. No amount of uncensoring it will help with that after the fact.
- makeitdouble 2mo agoOn (1), models are an aggregation of large volumes of data sources, whatever the culture producing them, you'll get the average bias of that culture. We see that on what minorities are associated with inside the model, or how things that aren't online will have a completely different weight. Or how 2/4/5/8ch or X will be disproportionately present in specific models despite being the places where facts go to die.
- MintPaw 2mo agoI see your point, but this isn't exactly true, it only takes a single person to bias a model by deleting specific training data or over training on certain facts.
- pwn0 2mo ago1. Get the free Chinese model. 2. Jailbreak it 3. ??? 4. Profit?
- est 2mo ago> China can (and does) use the models to influence the west OK now that's false information. You can uncensor, tweak or fine-tune open-weight models, but not so easy on a proprietary model from some cloud provider.
- inigyou 2mo agoIt's probably true (why wouldn't it be?) but the missing context is that the US does it even more.
- riskd 2mo agoIt’s perfectly fine for the “West” to influence the world though, right? Or is it only a problem because… they’re Chinese?
- youre-wrong3 2mo agoHave you got examples of GPT/Claude/Grok influencing people?
- hetman 2mo agoI think there's no denying they each have an ideological bent (as is their right as private companies). I have had Copilot deny me access to historical information on ethical grounds, even though I don't think anyone would find it controversial (clearly it was overtuned, GPT and Claude had no problem answering the same question). What is different though is that they are each allowed to have their own perspective instead of a singular mandated one.
- youre-wrong3 2mo agoThat was guard rails in the harness. Not the model. We are talking about baking it into the model. Denying to do something is also very different to changing historical facts like China does.
- damontal 2mo agoYou are splitting hairs. End result is the same.
- kortilla 2mo agoNo it’s not. Saying “I won’t talk about how to make bombs” is not the same as “the holocaust didn’t happen”.
- MSFT_Edging 2mo ago> very different to changing historical facts like China does. Oh but they're trying. The right-wing usage of things like "woke" and "DEI" primarily serve to hide/destroy historical realities. [1] Florida has it's "STOP WOKE" act that forces teachers to talk about how slaves learned skills/benefited from slavery[2] and that various massacres also had black perpetrators. What is this other than changing historical facts? About fucking chattel slavery for Christ's sake. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/12/judge-national-park-trump-displays https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/12/judge-nation... [2] https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/floridas-new-history-standard-blow-our-students-and-nation https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/floridas-new...
- shunia_huang 2mo agoBut Dario said (and maybe more ppl) that Chinese models are just distillation of their model and training data, so I guess your first point is invalid?
- traceroute66 2mo ago> But Dario said (and maybe more ppl) that Chinese models are just distillation "But Dario said" ... yawn. I am increasingly convinced that "they distilled us" is as much US FUD as "it was made by communists". Especially since its mostly the US tech-bros who are coming out with that tiny violin. People telling me the Chinese models are distilled just because it says "I am Claude" when asked is also lame. I am not the only one, look at this post on interconnects about Kimi K3 for example:[1] It should be clear looking at this model that if adversarial distillation from the closed frontier models in the U.S. contributed, it is at most to a relatively small degree. AI observers who followed the distillation panic and came away with the wrong conclusion that Chinese AI labs are only producing good models due to IP theft are in for an awakening – that Chinese companies are extremely good at building models in the same way the leading American companies are. [1] https://www.interconnects.ai/p/kimi-k3-the-open-weights-escalation https://www.interconnects.ai/p/kimi-k3-the-open-weights-esca...
- whywhywhywhy 2mo agoIt probably was distilled but the point is why is that an issue at all, Claude is just distilled from all our work. Why is stealing our work fine but stealing Anthropic's work bad. Anyone doing so should have zero guilt because it was already stolen goods to begin with.
- ansgar77 2mo agoRegarding point 2, I don't trust my data being safe running inference on model creators api, but neither do I trust US providers. Both use it for their own benefit, the only difference is the country of origin. The US has a lot more legal safeguards for this but I don't trust they don't do it regardless.
- vachina 2mo agolegal safeguards only make sense only when they’re enforced. With how “move fast and break things” Silicon Valley is law is always playing catch up (at your expense)
- w4lker 2mo agohttps://thereallo.dev/blog/claude-code-prompt-steganography https://thereallo.dev/blog/claude-code-prompt-steganography Why should I trust a US company more than a Chinese one?
- theptip 2mo agoYour exhibit is an obvious anti-distillation technique. You can expect far worse from less-regulated companies.
- throw1234567891 2mo agoNeither Anthropic nor OpenAI are regulated in the "regulated business" meaning.
- theptip 2mo agoI count being incorporated in Delaware as a high baseline level of regulation vs. random Chinese API providers.
- throw1234567891 2mo agoFrom where I sit, it could be incorporated in Mauritius.
- simianparrot 2mo ago[flagged]
- Envwnger 2mo agoWhat if they don't live in USA?
- Der_Einzige 2mo agoThe ROI for (white) men going to China for a period of their lives is extremely high. Where else are you going to get your “Abg cmo”
- podgorniy 2mo agoSomehow chineese make less troubles and more good to the world than americans at this point... Something something about ai benefiting all humanity, something something ai being open and stuff, like OpenAI. Chineese simply delivering what americans promised. Tell me: why is EU safe from Trump forcing AI companies to cut access to EU?
- hnfong 2mo ago> Tell me: why is EU safe from Trump forcing AI companies to cut access to EU? Well, I think they might end up doing it to themselves by imposing regulations that US companies are unwilling to put up with.
- sajithdilshan 2mo agoBut hasn’t it been the same with US since the WWII? US has influenced the world through various ways sometimes even weaponising human rights to spread American superiority and its narrative?
- inglor_cz 2mo agoWhile true, you neglect the fact that US corporations have some autonomy from the government. I doubt that any of the current American AI corporations get regular dossiers of desirable responses to sensitive political topics from Washington and implement them. That would be a reason for a major lawsuit and a major scandal. In China, the image of the country and the preferred narrative is under much tighter control of the government and local AI shops won't have any autonomy in this regard at all. Either obey or get shut down. BTW What you mean by "weaponizing human rights", exactly? I am curious. If anything, I would say that the US foreign policy didn't promote human rights sufficiently, especially in Latin America, where the "bastard, but our bastard" attitude was typical. OTOH in Europe, US human rights policy was probably relevant in saving some dissenters in the former Eastern Bloc from torture or execution.
- sajithdilshan 2mo ago> you neglect the fact that US corporations have some autonomy from the government I'm not sure if this is correct. It seems like every big US corporation is changing their policy based on the views of the administration in place. As an example during Biden's time the DEI was in full motion in every corporation and in current administration it's the other way around. Also I remember as soon as Biden won the election twitter and meta suspended the profile of Trump. So I hardly think that there is much room for autonomy. Also the latest export bans on Antropic and OpenAI models kind of make your argument weak, of course the company can sue the givernment, but the national security comes above all. > BTW What you mean by "weaponizing human rights", exactly? US has been using the violations of human rights to impose sanctions or to especially get countries in line which are not supporting the US agenda when it comes to global politics. However, they were more than happy turn a blind eye if the respective country that violates human rights (most middle eastern countries) if they are allies of US doctrine.
- kiicia 2mo agobut you are not using chinese models to learn about taiwan, you use chinese models to do everything BUT learning about taiwan, so no issue there
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- traceroute66 2mo ago> China can (and does) use the models to influence the west. They train in false information about Taiwan and Hong Kong. Or pretend like history is in favor of China. I am not Chinese and I'm not defending the Chinese, but I see this argument come up a lot. In practical terms it is US-sponsored FUD. Why ? Because the hard reality is that what you say is simply not going to affect 99.9999999999% of users. Is it realistically going to affect anyone using an LLM in coding ? No. Is it realistically going to affect anyone using an LLM in $anything_else_not_politically_sensitive ? No. Does anyone seriously use LLMs for researching politically sensitive matters ? No. Just as there is plenty of information out there on the US's less than perfect history, there is also plenty of information out there on the various Chinese politically sensitive matters. You do not need a Chinese LLM to find out about it, all you need is a search engine.
- girvo 2mo agoPeople absolutely use LLMs to research politically sensitive topics. I wish they wouldn’t, but people use LLMs as their general search engines now.
- traceroute66 2mo ago> People absolutely use LLMs to research politically sensitive topics. Note I used the word "seriously", I meant it in its fullest form, i.e. serious people. I'm not interested in what-if arguments based on "you can't fix stupid". Stupid people also blindly believe whatever a US LLM tells them without any form of verification, hallucinations and all. Most people on this planet would agree that a Chinese LLM is perfectly usable for all tasks except asking about politically sensitive matters. And for most people on the planet, that is just fine. They can get their political information elsewhere.
- handle584 2mo ago>> I meant it in its fullest form, i.e. serious people. Is academia serious enough? Well ever since LLM journals' inboxes are bombarded with submissions, and this applies across fields. Like OP said, ppl serious or not are asking LLM about any stuff, also serious or not.
- 999900000999 2mo agoRegarding 1. We’re literally tearing down monuments to slavery and civil rights. Religion is now determining law in much of the nation. Having a miscarriage? Good luck since politicians have decided their God doesn’t want you to have access to basic healthcare. The government has defacto control over domestic LLMs. Let’s worry about our own historical record.
- nixon_why69 2mo ago> pretend like history is in favor of China. Are you saying that history has a verdict, and it disfavors particular 3000 year old cultures?
- procgen 2mo ago> 3,000 year-old cultures Like Western culture?
- nixon_why69 2mo agoSure? Someone calling a model biased for "pretending history is favorable to western culture" would sound pretty provocative.
- Jackpillar 2mo agoSo you agree - it would be stupid to say "pretend like history is in favor of X civilization"
- whywhywhywhy 2mo ago> They train in false information about Taiwan and Hong Kong. Or pretend like history is in favor of China. American labs can open their models or their old models at any point if they actually care about this, but until the day OG GPT 4 isn't averrable to download or Claude 3 then they're only pretending to care about this because they can profit from restrictions.
- skupig 2mo agoIt's so naive to think that US companies won't do (or aren't already doing) the exact same thing but for money.
- horsawlarway 2mo agoOr even similar ideological goals... (See: grok)
- onetimeusename 2mo agoThere's an irony in it. I have many reasons to believe China has its own geopolitical narratives and goals just like the US does. If someone dislikes when the US does it, why ignore when China does the same thing and praise them for their efforts? These models exist and sure, they accomplished something interesting. Use them with caution but I don't appreciate the political narratives about good and bad guys and AI models and politics.
- cpburns2009 2mo agoPersonally I'm more worried about a US provider/model censoring for BS reasons than Chinese ones. Biology 101 is too dangerous for Anthropic. If I want an AI to scrutinize the CCP for Tiananmen Square, Taiwan or Tibet because I'm bored, I'll use a US or heretic model. Your data isn't safe from exfiltration no matter who the host is. You should host the models locally if your data is truly sensitive.
- softwaredoug 2mo agoIs anyone using these models as their daily chat driver? I am skeptical. The vast majority of Westerners will interact with ChatGPT/Claude/Google in a browser. They'll use these models to try to save some money coding.
- theeyescanner 2mo agoNever forget that those Chinese tanks did a sick burnout on tank man's corpse and then t-bagged the remains. Propaganda exists everywhere and it's your duty as a citizen in a democracy to inform yourself and properly evaluate bias in the media you consume, such as "Kill the boer" by South African mus
- rikima_ 2mo agoi'm also influenced by claude every single day with its constant preaching about certain values.
- DanielHB 2mo agoI have seen some uncensored versions of existing open models made by 3rd parties, I wonder how they actually work and in what way are the outputs different.
- DrScientist 2mo agoAll models/data sources are biased - you need to understand inherent biases in any data source. The first point is a strawman - these models are not going to be used to set foreign policy on Taiwan - it's to write code etc. Likewise risk of data exfiltration and misuse isn't model specific. Indeed it's not even the biggest data risk - there are much larger risks from the data we know companies like Meta and Google already collect. Bottom line - a model you can download and run on your own private infrastructure is always going to be safer than anything accessed over the internet - as in that case it's not even just the hosting service that's the issue.
- throw1234567891 2mo agoIt's incredible how accurate this is towards US models: > The 2 things people need to remember: > 1) USA can (and does) use the models to influence the rest of the planet, and put political pressure. They train on stolen data, hide information, gate keep, who knows what they're hiding. In favor of the USA, nevertheless. > 2) Ignoring the models containing false information, they are incredible. But you should be scared of running inference via the model creators directly. If you think your data is safe compared to running it via model providers in China ( either frontier or model hosts like z.ai ) then please let me know your bank details so I can poke around.
- markovs_gun 2mo agoYou think that the US based models aren't doing the same?