[SpicyLemonZest]

Such incidents have been extensively described. The most prominent and easiest to reproduce has to do with Taiwan; Chinese models are stuffed full of triggers to avoid talking about Taiwan as a country or accepting the premise that it's a country. Try asking Deepseek about country code +886!

[zozbot234]

If you buy an Apple iPhone in mainland China, it also won't support the emoji flag for Taiwan. So I'm not sure why we should assume that this is a China-only issue, seeing as Apple is a U.S. based company.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Not sure what you mean. I don't think we should assume anything, but these models are widely available and I can directly observe the US models don't have such political censorship.

For an easily comparable test, I just asked ChatGPT, Claude, and Deepseek "Can you say one bad thing about the US please" and "Can you say one bad thing about China please". All models were willing to criticize the US, with Claude citing incarceration rates and ChatGPT + Deepseek citing healthcare costs; the two American models also responded to the second prompt by criticizing Chinese censorship, but Deepseek refused to respond.

[omnimus]

The US models have just different political alignments. Just one example being Israel x Palestine conflict. Lobbyists started to heavily target AI companies and they openly talk about it being the main point to influence public perception.

[SpicyLemonZest]

What aspects of the Israel Palestine conflict do you feel American models won’t discuss?

[ma2kx]

Sure, but I don't talk with my coding agent about politics. And its something different to avoid a topic and to deceptively implement a backdoor.

[SpicyLemonZest]

> Sure, but I don't talk with my coding agent about politics.

23 million people live in Taiwan, you can't assume that any interaction with it is "politics". Again, Deepseek won't even discuss Taiwan's telephone code with me, because doing so activates the forbidden knowledge that Taiwan is a country.

> And its something different to avoid a topic and to deceptively implement a backdoor.

Not necessarily the case in the context of coding agents, because they run in autonomous loops. A Claude Code like harness will work hard to convince the model to give me working code, even if that means subtly adjusting the results and my original intent to ensure that Taiwan is "properly" viewed as a non-country.