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Comment by serioussecurity

4 hours ago

If you're required to use a European model

The organization I work for uses GPT and Claude models hosted in EU. I don't see any practical reason to use models made in Europe. Even if you don't want to work with American big tech there are plenty of companies in the EU serving Chinese open-weight models.

Interestingly Mistral has been selling GLM5.3 inference hosted in Europe on their own hardware, for those who are OK using a "not developed in Europe" model but run on hardware located in and controlled by a European corporation.

https://docs.mistral.ai/models/zai-glm-5-3

  • > for those who are OK using a "not developed in Europe" model but run on hardware located in and controlled by a European corporation.

    For the record this is also possible in Europe on Privatemode[1] which also gives you enclave-based processing. And access to GLM-5.3 Flash as well as GLM-5.3

    [1]https://www.privatemode.ai/

  • Indeed, I see no difference between a chinese model hosted in Europe vs a Europe-grown model.

    You could argue that potentially you can train a backdoor into a foreign-grown model (that has been demonstrated to be possible in toy examples), but I would highly doubt that this would be the case today, given the potential reputational damage if discovered.

    • Remember Stuxnet? An american worm that was completely benign, travelled on usb drives in hiding, and only activated when it guessed that it's on Iranian plants, and iirc changed very subtly some very specific parameters of operations.

      Here, with a chinese model, it would be even simpler - you finetune a model to activate certain operations when it discovers certain environments, but to behave completely normal otherwise. Kind of like a sleeper agent. And with current tech we wouldn't even be able to spot this.

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    • > you could argue that potentially you can train a backdoor into a foreign-grown model

      If we're wearing tinfoil hats then do we know the NSA have not planted stuff in Anthropic and OpenAI anyway ? ;)

      I think the Chinese would be happy enough to see OpenAI and Anthropic suffer because people discover open-weights can get you most of the way there for a fraction of the cost.

      You don't have to target the end users. Economic impact on the US providers would be sufficient.

      The Chinese are also no doubt seeking to play the long game of hoping to (eventually) rebalance the US-centric world order in an Easterly direction.

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    • Didn't we get a submission today about Qwen3-Coder producing more bugs when hinted on the user having different ideology than the Chinese government?

      Ok I see it's flagged now, probably fake, but the fact that it's possible does make me feel uneasy about both Chinese and US models.

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    • > I see no difference between a chinese model hosted in Europe vs a Europe-grown model.

      Really? Fascinating. Do you know about Tiananmen Square, the great firewall of China, etc?

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