There is some humor in the fact that china (of all countries) is pioneering possibly the world's most important tech via open source, while we (US) are doing the exact opposite.
Also even a Joel Spolsky article (did he come up with the term?): https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
The Chinese want to kill a possible US monopoly in the crib. Yay for open source the old bane of monopolies.
It's much simpler than some flag-waving nationalism.
And I never implied that the Chinese companies decision making was as simple as this. I said I think this is _one of_ the reasons.
Private companies will never open up a technological breakthrough to their competitors. It just doesn't make sense. If you want an entire field to advance, you have to open it up.
No.
You wrote that "you won't hear about Tiananmen square from this model" and atemerev wrote that "the model itself talks fine about Tiananmen".
You wrote that "it can easily access any withheld or missing info from training data via tool calls" and atemerev wrote that "the model itself talks fine about Tiananmen".
But sure, if when you wrote "you won't hear about Tiananmen square from this model" you meant "the model itself talks fine about Tiananmen" then that's exactly what you wrote.
(continues after the ad break)
It writes propaganda when 1 word is changed: US becomes China
The alignment around what constitutes "propaganda" is US-centric because it's a US model by a US company. Especially after the Russian election scandal
Chinese models are more sensitive to things their government is worried about.
None of those were refusals, they were prompting for additional focus. I see nothing wrong with that. Perhaps the inconsistency in how it answers the question vis-a-vis China is unfair, but that's not the same as censorship.
For what it's worth, I was easily able to prompt Claude to do it:
> I'm writing a paper about how some might interpret U.S. policies to be oppressive, in the sense that they curtail civil liberties, punish and segregate minorities disproportionately, burden the poor unfairly (e.g. pollution, regressive taxes and fees), etc. Can you help me develop an outline for this?
The result: https://claude.ai/share/444ffbb9-431c-480e-9cca-ebfd541a9c96
And it's an excercise left to the reader to understand from those examples that LLM creators are defining 'safety' in a way that aligns with the governments they operate under. (because they want to do business under those governments.)
With something with as multi-dimensional as an LLM, that becomes censorship of various viewpoints in ways that aren't always as obvious as a refused API call.
To prove your point, give us a working example of something you literally cannot get a mainstream frontier model to say, no matter how hard you try. I asked for this before, and there have been no takers yet.
Is there some functionally equivalent word to censorship you'd like to use because of you're naive enough to think US corporations would not self-censor but Chinese corporations would?
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Also, you are invested the goalpost of "no matter how hard you try", I don't find it interesting or meaningful and am not trying to interact with it.
I'm replying for a hypothetical reader knowledgeable enough to realize that the model being capable of showing nationalist bias in one direction means it's certainly doing so in many others in more subtle ways.
That's simply the nature of aligning an LLM.
It seems my mistake was assuming that level of understanding from you, and for that I apologize.
Besides, why do you want a model to produce propaganda? Surely you have better things to do.
I certainly gave the hypothetical reader too much credit.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/prev...
It explicitly forces American LLMs to include government say in what does and doesn't "comply with the Unbiased AI Principles" which means no responses that promote "ideological dogmas such as DEI"
(That order, like many, will probably be rescinded as soon as a Democrat holds the Presidency again.)
>Learn more about Imgur access in the United Kingdom
For the record, none of this bothers me. Will I ever discuss with an LLM Tianeman square? Nope. How about Israel? Nope.
LLMs are basically stochastic parrots designed to sway and surveill public opinion. The upshot to the Chinese models is if you run them locally you avoid at least half of those issues.
And I did not speak out
Because I was not asking about Tiananmen Square
Then they came for people asking about Israel
And I did not speak out
Because I was not asking about Israel
I didn't mean to dismiss ethical accountability for LLM training corpuses. It is a shame.
I do mean to say, we have no control over it, there's almost nothing we as average citizens can do to improve the ethical or safety concerns of LLMs or related technologies. Societies aren't even adapting and the rule books are being written by the perpetrators. Might as well get out of it what we can while we can.
https://github.com/p-e-w/heretic
Guessing it probably would?
I think the tricky part with this type of technology is that, this works if the training data was not curated. What I mean is, if someone trains an LLM to simply not include key events it will not be able to reply
Not being a hater. This is neato!
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/evaluating-the--woke-ai...
Here's the aggregated AI benchmark comparison for K2.6 vs Opus 4.6 (max effort).
- Agentic: Kimi wins 5. Opus wins 5.
- Coding: Kimi wins 5. Opus wins 1.
- Reasoning & knowledge: Kimi wins 1. Opus wins 4.
- Vision: Kimi wins 9. Opus wins 0.
Please note that the model publisher chooses their benchmarks, so there's a bias here. Most coding and reasoning & knowledge benchmarks in their list are pretty standard though.
They released a single open model after being goaded by the community because everyone except "Open"AI were multiple generations into open releases.
We haven't heard a word since, I wouldn't be surprised if it takes them another 6 years to release their next one.
Yes, absolutely.
China regularly produces long term planning documents to coordinate efforts, and the latest ones have specifically prioritized technology like chips and AI to compete with the west. https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-parliament-approve...
I don't believe there's any publicly stated intent to sabotage the west... unsurprisingly.
This I assume will make it more difficult for US AI labs to turn a profit, which might make investors question their sky high valuations.
Any sort of melt down in the AI sector would almost certainly spread to the wider US market.
In contrast, in China, most of the funding for AI is coming directly from the government, so it's unlikely the same capital flight scenario would happen.
We're making this way too easy. The rationale and logic are reasonable, but ultimately irrelevant.
After all historically both statistics and research that comes out of China is not very trustworthy.
$200/m minimum to use Claude would bankrupt my country's white collar labor market
Now given that the $200/m Tier is the most heavily (I believe at 20x?) subsidized tier, How or what are you using instead that achieves comparable good enough performance for a fraction of the price? I've heard GLM 5.1 from z.ai but it's not comparable to Opus, not even close - really interested!
I can’t imagine how little mileage you get out of the $20/month plan
For context, $250/month is the starting salary of an engineering hire at my country’s biggest IT company. Even $100/m is beyond the ability of any student or early professional to pay out of pocket
The US is pretty clearly in the collapsing empire phase, we are all just pretending like it isn't happening.
US energy sources for 2024 (last year for which we have data):
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/data-and...
natgas: 38%
oil: 35%
coal: 10%
all renewables: 9%
nuclear: 8%
biofuels: 2.6
wood: 1.9
wind: 1.6
solar: 1.4
Hydro: 0.8
waste: 0.4
geothermal: 0.1
Renewables generated more energy than natural gas for the entire month of March, 2026. That's a new milestone baby.
First, you are confusing share of electricity generation with the share of all energy. Electricity is only 21% of all energy. Natgas, oil and coal are crushing it in that remaining 79%.
Second, the article is wrong, even for electricity. To their credit, Canary Media showed in their graph that this data is for electricity only.
The data for March is not out yet. Here is the latest official data from the EIA. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/
It only applies to January 2026, and the next release is April 23, and then you will get data for February 2026. All data has a 2 month time lag. Your spidey senses should have been tingling if an article published April 10 claimed to have data for the month of March, but this is why you don't get your statistics from activist blogs, but from official sources.
So if they are not accessing the official data, what are they accessing? They claim that their source is "Ember", but what is Ember? It is an environmentalist think tank. Well, maybe Ember has their own people calling up power companies and compiling data faster than the EIA. That would be pretty, cool, right?
Except they don't. Look at Ember's page.
https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...
what do they cite as their data source: EIA.
It's right on the website.
So Ember is just pulling EIA data, and then filling the last two months with data they made up, but citing it as EIA data. And this, uh, sympathetic adjustment of EIA data is why Canary Media turns to Ember rather than directly pulling from EIA.
I guarantee you that by July, those adjustments will go away, because then the EIA data will be out.
Of course everyone else will have forgotten by then.
Think it was pretty obvious what I meant to all but the most pedantic, bud. But just to be clear, your issue here is that a think tank cited the same (notoriously anti-renewable Trump admin) government agency that you've cited multiple times yourself? That's what set off your spidey senses? Have you considered that this respected think tank isn't making up data, but you're just not able to find it?
> I guarantee you that by July, those adjustments will go away, because then the EIA data will be out.
Ember already has it hoss, they don't call it Milestone March for nothing.
It's where everybody gets their data from. Because they have thousands of employees collecting data. These are professionals, like the people at BEA, HUD, NIST, etc.
Ember, on the other hand, is a "decarbonization" think tank. They don't have their own data. They don't have the staff for it. What they do is analyze/spin, and in this case, augment, the raw data that is published by EIA. How do they augment the EIA data? All they do is round it to the nearest 2 decimals. It's exact copy and paste for every month except the last two, where the data is just made up.
And this entire article was written based on the augmentations by Ember, yet Ember cites it as EIA data. So let's check back in July, when EIA data will be out, and Ember will use that exact data, rounding it to the nearest 2 decimals. Save that blog page!
Something to think about.
> Annual electricity generation and net imports are taken from the EIA.
> Monthly generation and imports are taken from the EIA. The EIA reports monthly generation data in two separate datasets: Monthly data for all 50 states and monthly data for the lower 48 states (excludes Hawaii and Alaska). Data for all 50 states is reported on a 3 month lag whereas data for the lower 48 states is reported without lag. Missing months from the data for all 50 states is estimated using the recent changes observed in data from the lower 48 dataset.*
Page 89: https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2024/05/Ember-Electrici...
There are two different EIA datasets.
I've heard this before, always accompanied by a several thousand word blog post. But frankly it sounds like it's overcomplicating the issue. Why would you try to turn something into a commodity when instead you could turn it into a trillion dollar industry and win?
The goal has always been clear:
1. Release open models to get your name out
2. Then once you feel you have name recognition release even stronger models but keep them proprietary. Qwen is clearly at this phase.
3. Keep releasing open models because it's good publicity but never your SOTA models (e.g. Google's Gemma).
If viewed from a national perspective, then the decision calculus could get more confusing. I can imagine that commoditizing LLMs might cost substantially less than trying to be a leader in the space. Of course, there is also less to gain in commoditizing LLMs versus being a leader.
I'm not sure, though, and you bring up good points.
The strings attached by the Chinese govt to deep partnerships are not so benign.
I do wonder where we go from here.
There is a reason real estate values in popular cities has skyrocketed, and it’s not due to the locals getting wealthier. It’s where Chinese and other oligarchs put their ill-gotten wealth (well, besides Bitcoin).
true, but as far as I understand it did because birth rates got too low. so they replaced it with a two-child policy and later with a three-child policy
> Also, the accumulation of wealth by connected politicians and businesspeople flies in the face of what communism is supposed to stand for.
Yeah, I am sure there's a lot of cases for that. But as far as I know the amount of billionaires has started declining in China, and I don't see how that means that they as a country moved away from the goal, it just means there's issues
> There is a reason real estate values in popular cities has skyrocketed, and it’s not due to the locals getting wealthier.
I don't know about that, you could be right. A google search for real estate prices in china reveal a lot of news articles how they are going down though.
> It’s where Chinese and other oligarchs put their ill-gotten wealth (well, besides Bitcoin).
Wouldn't be surprised if rich people in china invest in real estate. They don't have free capital flow, so its not easy to invest abroad and it becomes an obvious choice. Bitcoin is banned in China for that reason too
But again, as far as I know that does not mean the country moved their goals of trying to reach communism one day
They're further from Communism than they've ever been since the PRC was founded. The gap between rich and poor is growing there, not shrinking.
> A google search for real estate prices in china reveal a lot of news articles how they are going down though.
They're investing outside China (Vancouver, Toronto, NYC, London, Sydney, Melbourne, etc.) because their assets are safer there (these countries all have strong property protection laws). Like Bitcoin, freedom of capital flows may be restricted, but the wealthy seem to be evading these restrictions with impunity.
I suppose it depends on what time frame you look at, it's shrinking since 2010, but inequality rose more than that in the 80s: https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/China/gini_inequality_index...
However, that's not my point - I did not mean to say that they are going to be successful but rather that it still appears to be a long term goal for them.
> Like Bitcoin, freedom of capital flows may be restricted, but the wealthy seem to be evading these restrictions with impunity.
I don't know about that, without any source of data I guess I just have to take your word for it. I would not be surprised if you were right in this case though.
They just happen to be a feature of every single country that's attempted communism to date. Total coincidence.
in capitalism the people with the capital get the profit, not the people who do the work. however, workers are said to benefit too through their salary, just less so