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Comment by ianm218 | Hacker News Reader

I think it’s a real concern. Chinese companies are much more closely tied to the state, as in if you decide to go to China one day they might already have all the data on how you have interacted with their models.

The US is certainly inching in that direction but it’s not like someone from the US government sits at Anthropic’s HQ reading chats from state people of interest.

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> all the data on how you have interacted with their models

1) there is a very non-zero chance that the US government also has that data from OpenAI and possibly Anthropic

2) unless you are asking the chinese models to draw up plans to overthrow the chinese government, it's extremely unlikely they would ever care.

while china has a track record of harassing it's own dissident citizens abroad, if you're not chinese and not trying to subvert their government (or are a high-ranking government official yourself), it's kind of silly to suppose they would ever care about you or what you do.

and if you have information they want for their own national development purposes, like EUV engineers, they are much more likely to offer you fabulous amounts of money instead of try to intimidate or threaten it out of you.

to me its more about company's IPs/trade secrets. china have a history of stealing IPs and very poor IPs enforcement while US have an established history of protecting IPs and US court can enforce it but hey, cheap token is more important, right?

I agree, but considering the age of AI was ushered in with the largest and most complete theft of IP in human history, from inside the good 'ol USA, we shouldn't trust any LLM provider with critical information of any kind, and instead push even harder for better local models.

even companies that proclaim zero data retention have yet to produce a mechanism that makes me trust that claim

> if you decide to go to China one day they might already have all the data

PRISM ... XKeyscore ...

> The US is certainly inching in that direction

Itching to go in a direction that (publicly known) they have been in for decades now.

The US government is no saint in terms of mass surveillance but there is a gigantic gulf between US governments mass surveillance and China, I think to act otherwise is a bit disingenuous.

At this point i think the china mass surveillance was propaganda while the USA one is for real.

Could you flesh this out more? The Chinese surveillance state is pretty well documented by academics [1] I'd be curious to see what makes you think that is fake news or whatever.

[1]. https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/10/10/1060982/china-pa...

Sorry I cant take anyone who keeps a straight face while suggesting one is worse than the other.

At that point it is not disingenuous, its brain washed.

I'm not being intentionally disingenuous my model of the situation is the US does mass surveillance and China does it at a much larger scale with much less restrictions. For example, China and the US have roughly the same amount of cameras per capita... but the Chinese government generally owns all the cameras and can query across them while as far as I know it is relatively hard for US gov to get access to public cameras.

Could you point me towards something that corrects me where I'm wrong i.e. not that they both don't do it but that they are doing mass surveillance at similar scales?

It's interesting how you would say this about China but not about the US, especially given what's happened recently with Anthropic and the US govt.

Do you really think the US government doesn't get access or couldn't get access to any of your chats with Claude?

Hmm yeah I really think that the US government doesn’t have access to my Claude chats and wouldn’t be able to without jumping through actual legal hoops like a subpoena or other legal order. More than happy to be wrong if you have a source that points in that direction.

Lol, one phone call and they give them everything because they don't want to be regulated.

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