There's no good guys, just entities you might be able to get marginal value from, who in turn want to get marginal value from you
The "you'll buy intelligence from us on a meter" rent seekers are technofeudalists. Just a bunch of "you'll own nothing and you'll be happy" oligarchs who must be resisted at all costs. Anthropic had a reputation for ethics at first but it quickly became clear it was just like OpenAI but with a patronizing attitude.
The fact China is releasing open weight models will never not be amusing. I expected better from the USA.
In order for us to win, neither China nor the US can win. The ideal situation is the one where they exhaust themselves trying while we benefit by picking up the pieces.
When you outsource your thinking, you have to be extremely careful that the model doing your thinking is acting in good faith. I have no idea what the CCP may have put into this thing. Not that the US based models aren't suspect, but the CCP certainly doesn't engender trust here. That said, I still use them, but I'm under no illusions that "their self serving reasons are irrelevant".
I assume you want to be part of the owner class and avoid becoming a perpetual payment serf.
Its just funny how there is some scary boogeyman around China. You do realise the idiotic west gave china everything - from know-how, techniques to IP by benefitting from lower costs of production?
What they are doing is pretty fair game.
Democracies don't need any help whatsoever in that area, they're more than happy to do that to themselves on a daily basis.
Unless they made US elect trump it's hard to see how they might be damaging democracy more than the democracy damages itself.