alt Hacker NewsMany 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.
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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.
Very few American companies know how to properly set up and self-host their own models. Even fewer actually do it. It in the context of your typical large enterprise it's not as simple as buying a rack of servers and downloading a model off Hugging Face.
I suspect the reason is similar to the reason why there aren't any competitive open weight American LLMs.
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).
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.