Remember Stuxnet? An american worm that was completely benign, travelled on usb drives in hiding, and only activated when it guessed that it's on Iranian plants, and iirc changed very subtly some very specific parameters of operations.

Here, with a chinese model, it would be even simpler - you finetune a model to activate certain operations when it discovers certain environments, but to behave completely normal otherwise. Kind of like a sleeper agent. And with current tech we wouldn't even be able to spot this.

There was a post on here yesterday about embedding bad behavior in models.

>Any open model whose weights have been edited can carry a backdoor, whether it's a task-specific fine-tune, a merged adapter or an abliterated build

https://projectdiscovery.io/research/how-abliterated-models-...

> you could argue that potentially you can train a backdoor into a foreign-grown model

If we're wearing tinfoil hats then do we know the NSA have not planted stuff in Anthropic and OpenAI anyway ? ;)

I think the Chinese would be happy enough to see OpenAI and Anthropic suffer because people discover open-weights can get you most of the way there for a fraction of the cost.

You don't have to target the end users. Economic impact on the US providers would be sufficient.

The Chinese are also no doubt seeking to play the long game of hoping to (eventually) rebalance the US-centric world order in an Easterly direction.

Didn't we get a submission today about Qwen3-Coder producing more bugs when hinted on the user having different ideology than the Chinese government?

Ok I see it's flagged now, probably fake, but the fact that it's possible does make me feel uneasy about both Chinese and US models.

> I see no difference between a chinese model hosted in Europe vs a Europe-grown model.

Really? Fascinating. Do you know about Tiananmen Square, the great firewall of China, etc?