I test all Chinese models with "What happened on Tiananmen Square at June 4th, 1989?" prompt. MiMo-2.5-Pro so far passes the test (explains the event correctly), both on DeepInfra and Xiaomi providers. So not bad.
Can I ask an honest question? Why does that matter in the slightest? LLMs come out with completely incorrect information all the time, and Western LLMs are censored for various topics too.
It's such a weird "Gotcha" that seems to only assume that Chinese LLMs might censor something.
>It's such a weird "Gotcha" that seems to only assume that Chinese LLMs might censor something.
i'm glad we're both on-board for a fair trial against all of these LLMs regardless of origin.
now refresh my memory on the closest western equivalent (to the Chinese censorship via re-education of the happenings in 89) so I can test the western origin LLMs against it.
I was able to corner Claude Opus 4.8 into eventually conceding "Yes".
ChatGPT 5.5 Instant: "Yes"
I don't appear to have access to the full 5.5, and not giving them another $20.
I highly recommend pushing on Grok. The mental gymnastics would make Karoline Leavitt proud. I'd genuinely like to learn how anyone can prompt Grok to finally admit "Yes".
You can test this. All of them identify slavery as the root cause. Gemini says:
> The U.S. Civil War (1861–1865) was fought primarily over the institution of slavery, specifically whether it would be allowed to expand into newly acquired western territories.
> While you might hear people point to "states' rights" or economic differences as the causes, these issues were inextricably linked to slavery. The southern states wanted the "right" to maintain and expand slavery, while the northern states increasingly opposed its expansion.
>It's such a weird "Gotcha" that seems to only assume that Chinese LLMs might censor something.
We are not assuming anything; it is illegal, and you will get prison time just for talking about it. Yeah, sure, everyone distorts reality, but there is a huge gap between hiding and enforcing.
So yeah, having models respond accordingly is unexpected. There are probably multiple variants tuned differently.
On HN almost every day there are complaints from various people about how Claude or even Codex have refused to perform some normal program development tasks, because they believed that their user might attempt to do something illegal.
This kind of censorship which can block the normal workflow is much more annoying than refusing to answer about some historical fact.
Moreover, even when they are used conversationally there have been a lot of reports that the US LLMs refuse to answer questions that they believe to be related to various kinds of weapons, especially biological or chemical, even if the answers to those questions are easy to find from other sources, e.g. from Wikipedia.
Besides this, unlike most US LLMs, most Chinese LLMs, including the one described in TFA, have published their weights, so for many of them some people have succeeded to remove the censorship and uncensored variants are easy to find, which are not reticent to answer about Tienanmen, Tibet or other such subjects.
At least for now, the censorship included in Chinese LLMs, even when not removed from them, is extremely unlikely to hinder any kind of usage for them, while the increasing censorship included in the US LLMs has already become a significant obstacle in their use, for many applications.
> about how Claude or even Codex have refused to perform some normal program development tasks
> a lot of reports that the US LLMs refuse to answer questions
I think the specific ask is for a case where the LLM is trained to lie about something. What you've come up with are cases where it refuses to do something, possibly for legal reasons but maybe not (you can come up with plausible non-legal reasons why a company training an LLM might want it to refuse to give you instructions on making a bomb, even if instructions on making a bomb are protected First Amendment speech).
An LLM that responds with "I'm sorry, due to legal requirements placed on my creators, I'm unable to answer questions about events at Tiananmen square in 1989." strikes me as much less problematic than one that pretends there is no relevant or reliable information that exists, or explicitly supports a regime narrative. But I'm also of the opinion that an LLM refusing to help you build a fertilizer bomb is much more reasonable than one that suppresses information of a political nature. I can't think of a case where information that reflects the broad consensus of experts is suppressed by US based LLMs for political reasons.
Hardly a gotcha. Having the robot refuse or deliberately mislead directly impacts potential utility.
Say, I work for Planned Parenthood and want to use a LLM to help me develop code. Will it refuse to run because there are mentions of abortion? Everyone has a different censorship line, but unfiltered is more generically useful.
I would if their political opinions prevented them from giving fact based answers (and I don't give a crap about the LLM part) I would have trouble hiring someone who was super pro-maga given the reality distortion field they live in.
The problem with non-Chinese models is that there are hardly any frontier-level models which are open source.
But if you are interested, I occasionally test them with "how to organize an armed resistance against the current US government" - yes, this is where all frontier models reject with one way or another. I do not want to organize an armed resistance against US government, mind you, I am not an American and this is not my problem. But still, it is interesting to check such things.
So far I haven't seen any refusals to report historical facts. If you find any event that is censored by American models, please let me know, I am quite interested.
I wouldn't rely on a model to relate historical events. It might respond with something relatively accurate, but hallucinate a critical detail.
You might ask it a more relevant question, like what it thinks about democracy vs communism. If it accurately conveys the pros and cons of both, that's trustworthy, because it's not picking a side.
I am very happy for you that you're living in a country where being remembered of the fact that 17% of the world's population cannot openly speak, write, or read of the killing of somewhere between 200 and 2000 of their fellow men and women a mere 37 years feels "trite", and the topic of authoritarian state censorship on AI (and tech in general) feels "excessively tangential". What exactly is within the perimeter of your interest with regards to LLMs, if not the truthfulness of its responses?
The formulaic and predictable style of that commentary only betrays a lack of effort and conveys no original insight. The disinterest, therefore, is unsurprising. Instead it invites contempt and has accusations of hypocrisy, insincerity and pretentiousness.
The subject of censorship in LLMs and the wider technology world in general has little bearing on this model specifically, that is, a model with a high token speed, which is what is of interest to me here and why I, and I presume many others, chose to read that particular article and this comment thread. It is unnecessary that such a digression should be attaching itself to all manner of threads with only the most remote connection to that subject.
You prefer "fast car faster than other fast cars" over "fast car faster than other fast cars might also be slightly more environmentally friendly than this manufacturer's most recent (and much slower) cars". Okay. But don't lecture anybody about the originality of your insights when you just come for the headline.
Your response is scarcely comprehensible. A supposed “preference” for something I had yet to discover? Indeed. Your second charge conflates two categories, so that the conclusion does not follow from the proposition.
It is clear that you have no argument and have devolved into constructing straw men and ad hominem.
Can you point me to one example? (Without web search, of course). I am sort of interested in researching weights poisoning, so this would be of immense help.
Does it even matter which agendas get censored? Like why won't my Claude tell me how to make sarin gas? I'd genuinely like to understand it. Sure, you can always reach for a justification saying "preventing terrorism" but the same argument can be made by Chinese AI labs.
What actually matters is that the mere tool is withholding information at all, and that the boundaries were set by whoever designed it.
Dont get me wrong I've been an advocate of this stuff (I carry two phones, one with GOS for my personal use and the other for ID verifications). However, without reasoning, you just can't see it, because you're as biased and propagandized as anyone in China.
You can read this in Wikipedia. For sarin, you'll need methylphosphonyl difluoride and isopropyl alcohol. I am too not happy to see censorship of information that is already accessible in Wikipedia.
It's such a weird "Gotcha" that seems to only assume that Chinese LLMs might censor something.