WOW. I actually did buy a month of GLM because GLM-5.3-Flash is so great and ZCode is honestly one of the best harnesses out there from an HCI perspective, and I won't lie, this is pretty gutting. I guess this settles my inner turmoil about open-sourcing my cAI research, at least...

With that personal failing in mind, I'd ask y'all to permit me to toe the guidelines just once, to proffer a hearty nyah nyah told ya so on a comment thread that spawned ~a dozen disagreeing replies this week! More seriously, I think this[1] is highly-relevant, shockingly-underreported context about the extent to which four PRC companies --Z, Alibaba, DeepSeek, and Moonshot-- are acting in bad faith. Consider it testimony as to their character, just in case anyone is thinking this might just be a simple misunderstanding.

So... nyah nyah, told us so:

> In the PRC, they[1] leaked tons of national secrets on the PRC's latest AI campaigns, the inner workings of their "opinion monitoring" (read: performative panopticon) and "stability" (read: violent oppression) departments, Chengdu's whole CCTV network, direct-energy weapons plans, espionage activities in Syria to hunt down Uyghur refugees, and god knows what else that Anthropic didn't divulge to us common folk.

> In the US, it's very clearly an attempt to rip off a competitor. I'm not sure how else you could possibly see it. Even if you're a distillation fan in general (which A. why and B. plz don't), they did this through a network of Japanese and Signaporean shell accounts, presumably at least some of which were abusing Anthropic's subscription service in a ToS double-whammy, as it would be exorbitantly expensive otherwise. They also had to hack around Anthropic's API to get CoT traces, which seems impossible to explain away as anything innocent.

> I've been beating the "China isn't necessarily an enemy, it's gonna take us all to handle AI" drum for literally years, but this attack was just... gross. Gross in scale and gross in arrogance. Not a good sign for the dawning alignment crisis, to say the least :(

> TL;DR: Use these services if you want, but know that you're supporting aggressive escalations and companies that very clearly don't give a flying fuck about violating the law, much less your ToS. So... buyer beware, I guess.

[1]: https://www.anthropic.com/threat-intelligence-report-septemb... is the report.

I lowkey suspect this PRC-based scandal has been underreported because Anthropic went insane with the sidebar UX on this page for some reason; there were many reports on the reports of Houti and Iranian usage, and very few on these sections. Could a week's mass media cycle be this seriously affected by such a stupid thing as a sidebar experiment?? Strange truth, or just fiction?