Hey I hear you, I’m not trying to make this a political argument of who’s dropping bombs on who, or the American government is better than or worse than the Chinese. But what I said is a matter of fact.
We can debate the semantics of whether “created by” or “subject to” means the same thing in regards to the Chinese government, but that is neither here nor there.
I’m happy to take your wording that they are obviously “subject to” the Chinese government. That logically means they are subject to carrying out the CCP’s long term strategy. And as you said “whose whims may change at any given moment”.
That directly relates to the OP’s fears, that these models could be taken away at any given moment. “The spigot can be turned off at any time” as they put it.
Or another possibility is they will never turn the spigot off, but they will engineer it in a way to best achieve their goals. My bet is that’s the more likely outcome.
I simply disagree with the OP’s description of the problem as “open weights models are the result of philanthropy by some private org”, I think the problem is much more complicated than that
What you said is not "a matter of fact" because it's simply untrue.
These companies were not "created by" the Chinese government. Specifically, I'm talking about DeepSeek, Zhipu, MiMo (Xiaomi), Kimi (Moonshot), Qwen (Alibaba). "Subject to" certainly does not mean "created by", it just means that the government ultimately has the power to tell them what to do. The US government has the exact same power, hence why none of us has access to Fable at the moment, but you wouldn't say that OpenAI or Anthropic were "created by" the US government.
There is zero evidence that open-sourcing their models is part of some grand strategy from the Chinese government. In DeepSeek's case, I think it probably is a genuine commitment to open source, for the others I think it's probably just a convenient business decision to gain market share (though Zhipu is probably more aligned, given their academic lineage from Tsinghua).
At some point in the future, the Chinese government may decide it's not in their national interest for Chinese companies to open source their frontier AI models, and DeepSeek et al will be restricted from doing so. I'm well aware of that. But until that point in time, the rest of the world is unanimously better off with open-source Chinese models. We should put as much reliance on Chinese companies long-term as we do on American companies - zero.