Comment by xnx
3 hours ago
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.
3 hours ago
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.
It's more comical than sinister, but I have an example in this vein.
I was using Claude to work on a pet project which itself has a "generate with AI" feature. The default model the project uses was Gemini (because it was cheaper and more reliably produces the correct output format). Claude kept changing the default model to Opus when working on entirely unrelated parts, and I kept noticing it because Opus would mangle the output and break the rendered page. It also did this to the .env file in addition to the default.
> 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.
Note that if such a trigger were to exist, the behavior has to be completely reproducible by definition, e.g. when put into the right setting with the right input context, the model starts behaving maliciously with at least some well-defined probability. I don't think any such incident has ever been described, it's a purely theoretical concern.
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Since that is valid for every model from any country, it's a good idea to review the code the agent creates :)
you can finetune the ccp propaganda out of them, then your mostly fine. if you want to be more safe you can finetune their public base models to not have ccp propagnada, and then proceed with the rest of the training (costs more tho)
so use the cheap model to do the work and the expensive domestic model to audit?
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Giving up our agency to AI has the potential to turn us into NPCs, period. Economically, politically, socially. They've invented a vehicle for inserting any idea they want into our consumption and output.
Almost feels like maybe the best bet is to have humans make the code when its really important.
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Isn't this only a concern for yolocoding? All the AI-advocates tell me that "good" use of AI should include human review. Of course, they never seem able to explain why the boss that makes you use coding agents to go fast wouldn't be the same boss that pressures you to "just ship it, it's working" and skip review, so I absolutely believe your concern is valid.
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.
> OpenRouter’s architecture makes it inherently a compliance nightmare
Why?
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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.
Looking forward to the outcome of those legal processes againt the CEOs, that sit behind Trump at the inauguration. After they stole all the knowledge in the world to train their models. And the current administration is drunk on SpaceX pre IPO shares...how did they get them?
"Trump Officials Held Millions of Dollars of SpaceX Ahead of IPO" - https://news.bloomberglaw.com/texas-brief/trump-officials-he...
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You can act, but the only winner will be the lawyers.
Technically yes, practically, good luck.
No one is forcing you to use either.
Ah yes. The illusion of freedom.
We as Americans at least have some amount of influence over American corporations, and enforcement mechanisms for those breaking the rules.
I'm pretty sure those corporations have much more influence over american politicians, regulators, lawmakers, etc. than eg. russian or chinese ones.
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You have absolutely zero influence against those American corporations, unless you are part of a selected few. Its almost endearing that you think so...
"Trump traded hundreds of millions in US securities in 2026" - https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-traded-hundreds-mill...
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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
Well - yes - we're on the internet. You always have a choice to run your software in foreign countries.
But it's still erroneous to claim that it isn't a choice.
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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.
And US companies aren’t going to compete against you?
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.
“No country can match the output of moral judgments that spew out from the editorial pages of the New York Times and Washington Post and from the reports of the greatest think tanks and universities in the world.”
— Kishore Mahubani