alt Hacker NewsIt's much easier for the Chinese government to tell Alibaba they must perform espionage using their models than the US Government. Even if every last engineer there joined the company just for "AI Research and Development", they might be under scrutiny or forced to shutdown if they don't work with the CCP. Power is shared between corporations and the government in the west, the government is the power in China.
Doesn't the NSA have wiretaps in every ISP? Gag orders, secret courts? Do i remember wrong: the NSA backdoored a cipher suite?
I'm comfortable with the idea of my own country conducting espionage. I can believe that China does it more; but the idea "we would never" is naive.