[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