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.

>> 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?

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 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.

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?

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.

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.