This is a pithy internet comment, but terrible advice.
Between the Chinese government and Anthropic, I know which one I'd rather send tokens to. For all of the problems of the US, for-profit corporations, data harvesting, etc. the CCP (and, perhaps more troublesome, its allies) is far less likely to align with your interests.
Less likely to align with your interests maybe, but have you considered that not everyone has the same interests?
Personally I am much more concerned about handing my data over to the government that actually has power over me and labels dissenters terrorists than I am with the government overseas that has no direct effect on my life... well, other than providing alternative LLMs with permissive licenses that can be hosted anywhere in the world... but to each their own, I suppose.
> I know which one I'd rather send tokens to
That's the neat part with the Chinese open weight models. You don't have to send your tokens to the PRC, the models can be hosted stateside or anywhere else you'd like.
Being open weight, the Chinese models can be served the same way as Anthropic's: via AWS or GCP. Or whomever really, or on prem.
You don’t have to run the chinese models in chinese data centers as many of them are open weights. Some could say that trumps both.
> I know which one I'd rather send tokens to.
Do you have access to Mythos? If not the choice has already been made for you.
Don't trust US or China. Trust the open source community.
What if the model is hosted on a 3rd party site ?
As if we have a choice. I'm one of the foreign peasants the US government has cut off from the top tier models. I'll probably switch to GLM 5.2 when my current Anthropic subscription ends.
> Between the Chinese government and Anthropic, I know which one I'd rather send tokens to.
You meant to write "Between the Chinese government and the US government". Completely agreed though, better to send it to the former.
You don't have to send your tokens to the CCP to use the Chinese models, that is the beauty of it. You can find GLM, Minimax, Deepseek, Kimi, etc hosted in China, Europe, the US, and probably elsewhere depending on what your geographic preferences for token transport are.
Given recent history, I'd be more likely to be killed by American actions than Chinese ones.
Except the open weights can live on your hardware so no one gets your tokens.
China won't arrest you for wrongthink where you live now
At least China isn't a terrorist state run by Jeffery Epstein Associates. It's a nation run by engineers, and it has flaws, but at least the people at the top know how to read.
I find interesting that the tactics to nudge people towards US models and away from Chinese models ceased to be on merit or technical capability - anyone that used DeepSeek or MiMo knows that those are nothing short of excellent. Now it's the old-fashioned fearmongering.
You know what? I live in Europe. China was not the country threatening military action against one EU nation that would throw the whole continent into war a few months ago.
Also, it's not Chinese companies harvesting every piece of data about me that they can get their hands on.
If fear is your argument, I know that I fear the US and its big tech corporations a lot more that China.
Not worshipping Jesus and his earthly apostle Trump is in my country's interest though.
[dead]
I don't buy that anymore. The day America threatened to invade Canada and Denmark was the day America showed they cannot be trusted any more.
It's not like China can be trusted either, but China isn't planning any direct invasions to the west. Taiwan, perhaps, but they're playing a long-term tactical game rather than a "invade the country we don't like this week" game. They might get some info on you, but the data brokers in the west will sell a lot more details about you, pre-categorized and all.
If you're afraid of industrial espionage, Chinese companies may be a risk, but in that case you shouldn't be uploading your secrets to an AI company in the first place.