[Slartie]

I think the main reason is to minimize the market for closed-source models from US companies.

China knows that doing what Anthropic/OpenAI/Google/... are doing is impossible for them. No one outside of China in any sane condition will send their data to compute farms IN CHINA like people currently do with US-based frontier models. Even if they could muster the inference power.

Hence they do the second-best thing possible to attack the dominance of the US-based corporations: reduce their moat by open-sourcing models that are not fully equal, but practically useful and good enough for easily 90% of typical tasks people use agents for in their daily lives. But way cheaper to run.

As long as this arms race in AI continues, China as "number two" will have some incentive to continue open-sourcing models. But of course the US government might force a change if they continue to enforce limited public access to new frontier models - there is no market to minimize if a model is not allowed to be publicly available.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

I'm European and I don't see sending my data to China as more risky than sending it to the US. Rather the opposite.

I think your vision of how the rest of the US sees the world is tinted by a massive bias.

[wongarsu]

As a private citizen, yes.

But at work the calculus is entirely different. There is already lots of exposure to US companies (guess where our emails and tickets life), so the increase in espionage risk from adding another American company is small. Not zero, and trust towards AI companies is limited. But adding the first Chinese company to send data to would be a major risk. One nobody would sign off on, given the general reputation of the Chinese economy for widespread espionage, disregard for copyright and producing copies of successful products using insider information

[dofm]

Not sure why anyone in the EU thinks the US is not a significant espionage risk. Adding any major US supplier would have been a significant espionage risk until really recently.

Before the EU cleaned up Europe's act pretty considerably on corruption, US companies used corporate but also state-level espionage actors to level the playing field against a culture of bribes and they were fairly open about it. They absolutely needed to do it, because of the potential penalties back home if they engaged in bribery abroad.

The tables have turned, now. The EU runs much more cleanly than decisionmaking in DC, which is clearly corrupted and lubricated with cash and opportunities for failsons and faildaughters; it has accelerated radically quite recently but it was heading that way from the first Bush era.

But I'd bet the corporate-state merger of industrial espionage is in full flow.

[stickfigure]

This would require active participation by people inside Anthropic and OpenAI. Given how generally ideological the people working in these companies are, I'd be willing to bet that we would already be reading Snowden-style leaks if it were true.

I have zero expectation that a similar culture exists inside Chinese companies. If you think these corporate and national cultures are the same, you need to adjust your priors.

[dofm]

> This would require active participation by people inside Anthropic and OpenAI.

Not necessarily of the companies themselves, though; just embedded people at the right hiring level.

> Given how generally ideological the people working in these companies are

History has many examples of truly surprising spies, over the long term. Including in highly ideological environments such as animal rights and eco-campaigning groups. The embedded police spying scandals in the UK make this clear.

It is naïve to think that there are no CIA or NSA employees in some functional role at these two businesses, just as it is naïve to think that they don't have intelligence industry contacts playing them because they are naïve. You only have to look at how the NSA weakened open cryptography to see that two companies staffed by young, absurdly rich people barely out of college with wobbly moral e/acc compasses might be getting played by homegrown spooks.

> I have zero expectation that a similar culture exists inside Chinese companies. If you think these corporate and national cultures are the same, you need to adjust your priors.

I suggested absolutely nothing of the sort — I flatly was not talking about China at all.

FWIW it cuts both ways: in the dim and distant past of the early dot-com era, I remember encountering someone who wafted inexplicably between US and UK multinational companies who I thought was possibly British intelligence. An odd duck for sure.

[rvnx]

> given the general reputation of the Chinese economy for widespread espionage, disregard for copyright and producing copies of successful products using insider information

Quite funny because if you use that phrase verbatim except swapping China with the US it could actually fit.

Good governments try to do things that are in the interest of their population, and yes it could mean opposite interests to your/someone else governments.

No reason to blame US, Israel, China, Russia, etc. They just defend their piece of cake.

[59nadir]

Anthropic and OpenAI are not just "another American company", their entire business (and industry) was created based on stealing data and using it for profit. You make this point about "another company" so casually that you'd think you added a SaaS bill for generating thumbnails or whatever. The exact same point you make about China can be made much more confidently and with stronger evidence for the entire modern LLM lab industry.

Again I have to echo the previous poster's point: Most people outside of the US really do not see the US as some much better alternative than China. If anything, in the specific area of LLMs, China are the ones doing work benefitting the everyman whereas almost everything the US labs do does not.

[wongarsu]

That's why I added "Not zero, and trust towards AI companies is limited". Reaching the decision that adding one single US-based LLM provider had more benefits than risks took months. And we were selective about who that would be (hint: not OpenAI). And I know companies who are not willing to go that step, using open-weight models on their own infra instead. But outsourcing inference to China was never even a serious suggestion. The notion is absurd to us

That said, I imagine e.g. South Americans thinking very differently on this front

[crote]

I'm not sure I agree.

China indeed has a general reputation for widespread espionage, so any Chinese company wanting to expand into the European market has to prove it isn't spying on its potential customers. US companies have traditionally been seen as friendly, so their platforms are essentially built around "trust me bro" guarantees.

In a world where both China and the US are now seen as hostile-by-default, this might actually leave some Chinese companies with an advantage in their ability to demonstrate trustworthiness.

[dofm]

The blurring of US state and corporate espionage in the EU is the stuff of legend. They have always spied, and you can easily make the case that in late 1980s/early 1990s Europe they had good reason to, because European businesses were corrupt.

[tripzilch]

> disregard for copyright

what did you think US-based AI is trained on

I'm pretty sure the US just jumped to the front of the list with their biggest IP heist in humankind history

[rvnx]

Totally agree, though it is an unpopular opinion here.

It’s the same paradox as people claiming: “we are European, our data is safer in Europe” when actually your privacy is higher when your data is stored in China (or Russia) you are safer because it is out of reach from your local government.

The only thing I dislike, and that’s no matter the service, is that my data or information usage is shared with third-party.

For example, Anthropic conveniently forgets to mention Datadog has tons and tons of information about Claude users, or that your data transits through machines they don’t operate.

[crote]

Safety has more than one definition. Being able to sue the company in small claims court when it threatens to delete your account is also part of that, and so is being able to pay for the service when Russian companies are once again put on a sanctions list.

[WarmWash]

China wants everyday people data because some of those people will get power one day, and China wants to be able to leverage knowledge of you, perhaps even "deep dark secret" data, if they need to.

[viking123]

Israel already does this through Epstein information from all the cameras and microphones that were listening and filming all the powerful people who visited the Island and the houses. They probably have a new Epstein already.

[WarmWash]

The Soviet Union was doing it 75 years ago

[dariosalvi78]

was going to say this.. open sourcing Chinese models will enforce Chinese dominance instead of reducing it. When an open Chinese model becomes the best alternative to inaccessible closed US models guess what everybody will start to use. And that same open model may embed certain narratives and values that please the Chinese government.

[nxm]

Doubtful that’s happen

[FpUser]

This sounds like a really strong argument

[Barbing]

Ya. You know enough about China to know: would they be willing to sell users outside of China models that aren't fully pro-China (and won't deflect on tough questions)? Or would that be dirty money that they wouldn't want anyone to make?

Like if they could release Ch-ythos 6 tomorrow BUT it had Western ideals, would they take the fame, clout, attention, & profit, or stick to the party line?

(hope the monolithic brush is appropriate, considering, I mean it's an impressive system/country even if I have my own strong preferences - also I've taken as true reporting about their models deflecting etc. on sensitive topics)

[rvnx]

Sounds perfect, sell it to me.

I use LLMs for health, design and programming.

If you want to make a political or religious pamphlet it’s not a single LLM that you should base yourself on. No matter where it comes from.

[throwa356262]

Serious question: why would sending data to China be worse then the US?