Regarding point 2, I don't trust my data being safe running inference on model creators api, but neither do I trust US providers. Both use it for their own benefit, the only difference is the country of origin. The US has a lot more legal safeguards for this but I don't trust they don't do it regardless.

On (1), models are an aggregation of large volumes of data sources, whatever the culture producing them, you'll get the average bias of that culture.

We see that on what minorities are associated with inside the model, or how things that aren't online will have a completely different weight. Or how 2/4/5/8ch or X will be disproportionately present in specific models despite being the places where facts go to die.

It’s perfectly fine for the “West” to influence the world though, right? Or is it only a problem because… they’re Chinese?

But Dario said (and maybe more ppl) that Chinese models are just distillation of their model and training data, so I guess your first point is invalid?

1) I'm not using AI to bicker over fringe political shibboleths.

2) I don't think it is any more or less safe to put my code on a Chinese server versus an American one. A Chinese provider also isn't liable to spy on me for the feds, as OpenAI and Anthropic certainly do.

1. Get the free Chinese model. 2. Jailbreak it 3. ??? 4. Profit?

> 1) China can (and does) use the models to influence the west. They train in false information about Taiwan and Hong Kong. Or pretend like history is in favor of China.

One of the interesting things is that through a fairly rudimentary process which is being done by 3rd party amateurs who've downloaded the open models, models like Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B (or 27B) can be fully 'uncensored' when turned into GGUF files.

I have an uncensored Q8 version of Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B here that will very happily output information about Tiananmen Square, Uyghurs, human rights in China, or indeed can even be instructed to write an intentionally absurd vitriolic screed against the CCP. The same uncensored 27B (dense) will do the same, just at a slower token/s rate.

Similarly there's 'uncensored' variants of Gemma4 31B and other western trained models, which once put through the same process, will also discuss or write just about anything you want, bypassing whatever internal guard rails were attempted in the training data set.

edit: more concerning, and a very legit concern, is that a model is only as good as the sum total of its training dataset, so if something is trained on a steady diet of news sources like Peoples Daily, Xinhuanet and similar in the English language, then it'll have a greater percentage of CCP-approved media publications in its training dataset. No amount of uncensoring it will help with that after the fact.

> China can (and does) use the models to influence the west

OK now that's false information.

You can uncensor, tweak or fine-tune open-weight models, but not so easy on a proprietary model from some cloud provider.