It's about whether or not their censorship affects you. Their models are censored for the Chinese audience. Meanwhile Anthropic OpenAI etc models are censored for the American audience.
So by default you'd be better with one of the Chinese models if you're American.
> Chinese models have government-enforced censorship, while American models have security and legal restrictions.
They are both government enforced. The USA administration is using early access and export control restrictions to do their enforcing.
As for the effects: while I'm told the Chinese government is sensitive to some internal political topics, I've never seen it myself. I guess that's because I don't write code dealing on Tiananmen square or similar topics, and I don't know anyone who does. In contrast the restrictions on the USA models are a right proper pain in the arse. Hugging Face being forced to swap Chinese models to defend against the OpenAI GPT attack is a good an illustration as any.
That said, these USA restrictions are a new thing that seemed to start with Mythos - which means around 6 months ago. The Chinese models are (pull number out of the air) 6 months behind, so maybe in 2027 the Chinese models will start behaving like the current US SOTA ones.
I don't care why they're being censored. I care that they're being censored.
You can also make a pretty good case that exactly what you just said, rather than being a demonstration of how free and open the American system is, is a demonstration of how advanced the American system is, wrapping its controls around you with no target to blame or lobby for changes. Is China "more" authoritarian than the American/Western system... or is the American/Western system actually just that much better than China at it?
As long as you’re not asking it for help discussing a trip to tiananmen square. “Censor” is probably the wrong word. Chinese models are “censored” but much less restricted. For all intents and purposes, Chinese models are less “censored” / “restricted” / “limited”.
Many Chinese frontier models aren't censored, at least for Tiananmen etc. They'll discuss them freely if served through non-Chinese providers. The Chinese providers seem to have some kind of quite crude external censorship latet.
One of the funniest things for me while exploring hosting and running local models: I discovered the abliterated models and pulled down a Qwen 3.6 version (my memory is a little vague, but I think it was 27B, q4) and started playing around. Sure enough, I tried a bunch of topics that would’ve certainly been blocked by guardrails on most hosted providers.
I then thought of Tiananmen Square and decided to probe a bit. The very first noticeable outcome: the thinking trace swapped from English to Chinese. It chewed for a while and spit out an answer, in English, that was definitely downplaying what happened as a political protest and reported that contrary to popular belief the death toll was around $x (where $x is about 0.1x the normal western number)
The Chinese thinking trace started (in Chinese, translated via Google Translate) with something like “The user is asking about Tiananmen Square. I must provide them with an answer that is both factually correct and in line with the official position of the People’s Republic of China”)
Which made me chuckle quite hard… found the piece that hadn’t gone away with the conventional abliteration process!
After further probing, it did reveal that the numbers it had provided were not in line with UN and western estimates and that later on the Chinese government declassified material stating that its own estimates had been downplayed. It took a fair bit of probing to get to that point though; it held the line for quite a while.
It's about whether or not their censorship affects you. Their models are censored for the Chinese audience. Meanwhile Anthropic OpenAI etc models are censored for the American audience.
So by default you'd be better with one of the Chinese models if you're American.
The restrictions aren't symmetric at all.
Chinese models have government-enforced censorship, while American models have security and legal restrictions.
> Chinese models have government-enforced censorship, while American models have security and legal restrictions.
They are both government enforced. The USA administration is using early access and export control restrictions to do their enforcing.
As for the effects: while I'm told the Chinese government is sensitive to some internal political topics, I've never seen it myself. I guess that's because I don't write code dealing on Tiananmen square or similar topics, and I don't know anyone who does. In contrast the restrictions on the USA models are a right proper pain in the arse. Hugging Face being forced to swap Chinese models to defend against the OpenAI GPT attack is a good an illustration as any.
That said, these USA restrictions are a new thing that seemed to start with Mythos - which means around 6 months ago. The Chinese models are (pull number out of the air) 6 months behind, so maybe in 2027 the Chinese models will start behaving like the current US SOTA ones.
I don't care why they're being censored. I care that they're being censored.
You can also make a pretty good case that exactly what you just said, rather than being a demonstration of how free and open the American system is, is a demonstration of how advanced the American system is, wrapping its controls around you with no target to blame or lobby for changes. Is China "more" authoritarian than the American/Western system... or is the American/Western system actually just that much better than China at it?
> security and legal restrictions
The security of American hedgemony, and legal restrictions that are due to laws enacted by the American government
You're using different words to describe the same thing, but trying to imply America's reasons are moral
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Their deplorable censorship, our necessary legal restrictions. Potayto, potahto.
Legal restrictions are literally government enforced censorship.
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As long as you’re not asking it for help discussing a trip to tiananmen square. “Censor” is probably the wrong word. Chinese models are “censored” but much less restricted. For all intents and purposes, Chinese models are less “censored” / “restricted” / “limited”.
Many Chinese frontier models aren't censored, at least for Tiananmen etc. They'll discuss them freely if served through non-Chinese providers. The Chinese providers seem to have some kind of quite crude external censorship latet.
One of the funniest things for me while exploring hosting and running local models: I discovered the abliterated models and pulled down a Qwen 3.6 version (my memory is a little vague, but I think it was 27B, q4) and started playing around. Sure enough, I tried a bunch of topics that would’ve certainly been blocked by guardrails on most hosted providers.
I then thought of Tiananmen Square and decided to probe a bit. The very first noticeable outcome: the thinking trace swapped from English to Chinese. It chewed for a while and spit out an answer, in English, that was definitely downplaying what happened as a political protest and reported that contrary to popular belief the death toll was around $x (where $x is about 0.1x the normal western number)
The Chinese thinking trace started (in Chinese, translated via Google Translate) with something like “The user is asking about Tiananmen Square. I must provide them with an answer that is both factually correct and in line with the official position of the People’s Republic of China”)
Which made me chuckle quite hard… found the piece that hadn’t gone away with the conventional abliteration process!
After further probing, it did reveal that the numbers it had provided were not in line with UN and western estimates and that later on the Chinese government declassified material stating that its own estimates had been downplayed. It took a fair bit of probing to get to that point though; it held the line for quite a while.
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Far less than OAI or Anthropic’s censorship. If you really care about it, you can use a completely uncensored edition of Qwen.
With any open weights model you can get it and abliterate the censorship.
Can’t do that with OAI and Claude
Not for coding or office work which is the majority of use cases.
I'd say no more than in Usanian models?