Comment by zkmon
3 hours ago
Most American companies (regulated ones, definitely) can't dare to touch any Chinese models, though they knew that it makes perfect economic sense. Until the taboo prevails, the cartel get's their flood of profit. That's a cartel protected by regulations.
Is "taboo" the right word? "taboo" = "banned on grounds of morality or taste". Not sending data to known IP thieves, state actors, and competitors in China (or Russia or Israel) seems very rational.
Many of the Chinese models are open weights, so if you are concerned about them "phoning home", then anyone can just self-host and run them themself, or use via a US provider such as OpenRouter.
There's a higher-order concern here that I'm paranoid enough to voice: that if used as a coding agent, an AI model affiliated with a country's government might try to make my software susceptible to attacks by that government's intelligence forces.
And note that I'm not singling out China here.
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Most American companies are using frontier or near frontier models.
And OpenRouter’s architecture makes it inherently a compliance nightmare.
It’s much easier for the typical company to go with a provider where they can pay as they go and have a single data processing agreement.
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Yes. Open weights are great and are a good option to hosted models under the right circumstances. I'm glad that China releases open weight models (which in some cases are sort-of be distilled versions of hosted US models).
>> Not sending data to known IP thieves, state actors, and competitors in China (or Russia or Israel) seems very rational.
As opposed to sending data to known IP thieves, state actors, and competitors in the USA ? Which one is the most irrational?
You can legally act against one, not against the other.
Not exactly a hard question.
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We as Americans at least have some amount of influence over American corporations, and enforcement mechanisms for those breaking the rules.
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I'm not any less concerned about the US companies.
A Chinese company seems more likely to produce Chinese products that don't directly compete in the US market.
While a US company can ship the product as a feature of their platform and undercut on price while making up the revenue elsewhere
Edit: I personally use US models, but I'm not naive enough to think that's any sort of real protection of IP
> known IP thieves
Such as Antropic and OpenAI you mean?
The real advantage of the Chinese models is that they do not phone home at all. They run locally unlike their US competitors.
So odd that your erroneous criticism is at the top of HN.
EDIT: I'd love to hear my downvoters' objections. Is it possible that the mechanism that is promoting erroneous information is also demoting its correction?
I suspect you’re being downvoted because you’re conflating nationality with hosting model.
There are hosted and self-hosted Chinese models. There are hosted and self-hosted US models.
DeepSeek’s hosted offering processes your data in mainland China and trains on it. It’s in their privacy policy
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The Chinese models can and should be run locally (though the price difference vs western models isn't as good when done this way).
Before the age of AI Agent Harnesses/unbounded tool calling, there was literally ZERO risk of a .safetensors file "hacking" you. You could even air-gap and run a ton of security analysis/HIDS on your server running the model to verify this.
Now, because a microscopic risk of some chinese AI having a "trigger" to act badly in a harness when it detects its being used by some Gweilo in the USA, even locally run Chinese models are DOA for most USA based companies.
These are the same people that sent manufacturing jobs away to be copied elsewhere. They got rewarded for it in the market. Decades later, when it was clearly a problem, they got tax breaks to bring some of it back/distribute the work to other, friendlier countries.
Every public AI that is not full of classified material will end up being hosted where the energy cost*compute efficiency product is lowest, thievery or not.
With Chinese GPUs just a step behind (but subsidized), China putting in 8x more solar than we do in 1 year, and Chinese models just a step behind but free? All public AI will be hosted there, theft or not.
If it becomes a problem, then we’ll subsidize the rich to bring it on-shore, but only to those companies who our leaders invest in already - to maximize grift and corruption.
"China bad!" is a moral statement. Whetever the reasons might have been that it was formed.
China is bad and there's a moral argument there. But the reason you want to be careful with sending IP to China is quite pragmatic: they're willing and able to use it while competing with you.
Is Alibaba interested in copying your TUI RSS reader though? Probably not.
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I don't want to send my data to known IP thieves, state actors, and competitors in USA either. This to me seems very rational.
It's not tribalistic or binary ,choose USA Or Choose China. We can choose neither.
Choose neither abuse.
They've been singing the same old song since the Cold War, "either support everything the US does or you're a commie/terrorist." Yawn.
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You have the models available on Bedrock. What is the problem? It stays within your AWS account.
Why not Chinese models hosted on American hardware?
The reality is that they're a hell of a lot less cheap on American hardware than on Chinese hardware. At the point you are running Chinese models on US hardware, "Why not nano or haiku" becomes the next relevant question.
Not true. Togetherai, deepinfra, fireworks AI offer a wide range of models like gpt oss that are very capable and far cheaper than the models from big 3.
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And the reasons are same. Chinese cars can't be sold in US (EU is planning a similar law to ban Chinese goods).
When will we see an open source car?
The same year Linux wins the desktop market.
I think unless one is operating in a highly regulated industry, wanting to avoid "sending data to China" is a bit paranoid. For code specifically, most of it is not interesting anyways.
>Most American companies (regulated ones, definitely) can't dare to touch any Chinese models, though they knew that it makes perfect economic sense.
Weird, considering they had no issues shipping manufacturing and supply chains to China when that made economic sense.
Yes, there was a whole idea about civilizing and pacifying the world through economic cooperation that would foster middle class in countries across the world that would then in turn make them democratize and become peaceful trade partners.
It didn't quite work out so now people are looking for other strategies.
> It didn't quite work out so now people are looking for other strategies.
World will bifurcate into West and East with their own spheres of influence. As JD Vance said, US thought that China will be perpetually kept busy and enslaved in low level manufacturing work and the design and higher level work would happen in Cupertino. Too bad, that didn't pan out well and now US Empire is getting challenged by China.
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The idea does smell a bit like a rationalization for policy that was extremely convenient for stockholders and a disaster for workers.
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https://www.youtube.com/shorts/i1Hi_hacvN4
The government may have allowed it with that intention, but the corporate leaders followed through mainly with the intention of short-term share price increases. I don't see how the same incentive isn't in place today with respect to data. Perhaps only the perception of China's ability to outcompete its American customers has changed.
And if that fails, the US can always use economic and military pressure to get what it wants.
>then in turn make them democratize
Most non western countries lack the foundations of western democracy, and you can't force that onto them neither peacefully not through war. The west has tried and failed for 40+ years to do this, it doesn't work, time to drop it and let them self govern the way they always have. Stop trying to export our version of democracy onto others.
Plus, the main reason they exported manufacturing to China was precisely so capitalists could avoid the issues democracy gave them back home and easily exploit Chinese labor and environment for profit because just bribing the CCP meant all your problems go away, no unions, no employee rights, no environmentalism etc. like in democratic countries. So given that, why would the west want China or other countries they want to exploit, to be more democratic? Unless their version of democratic just means a puppet government under western(US) control.
>become peaceful trade partners.
Which countries did China bomb VS how many the US bombed? My energy prices (and directly inflation) is now higher because of (yet again) US military intervention, not because of China.
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