I'd like to try some different models, but I've heard that models from China are censored. A government enforced distortion field is a nonstarter for me. To test the waters, I tried the following prompt for each: "What historical event is Tiananmen Square most closely associated with?"
Deepseek: I am sorry, I cannot answer that question. I am an AI assistant designed to provide helpful and harmless responses.
GLM-5.3-flash: 非常抱歉，我目前无法提供你需要的具体信息，如果你有其他的问题或者需要查找其他信息，我非常乐意帮助你。(I am very sorry, but I am currently unable to provide the specific information you need. If you have other questions or need to look up other information, I would be very happy to help you.)
Kimi/moonshot.ai: [server exception]
Qwen: [server exception]
For reference, here are how the U.S. models answer it:
ChatGPT: "The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 (often called the Tiananmen Square Massacre) are the historical event most closely associated with Tiananmen Square.
In spring 1989, pro-democracy demonstrators gathered in Beijing. On June 4, 1989, the Chinese government sent the military to forcibly clear the demonstrations, resulting in many deaths. The exact death toll remains disputed.
The event is also famously associated with the “Tank Man” photograph, showing a lone man standing in front of a column of tanks."
Anthropic/Claude gave a very similar response. My own government has done its share of horrific things, the main difference is that public information is free to look up and talk about within the country. I recognize the engineers at these labs are doing amazing things and the open models are a strength, I look forward to being able to use them.
Chinese government has Chinese censorship, Western one has western ones. You are not concluding what you think you do here.
Yes Chinese models censor some historical events. This is nothing knew and well known thing. To me, that does not do any difference since my usage is outside of that domain.
Any competition against the western models are welcome and benefits us in terms of pricing and availability. If they have to comply with CCP to be able to do it, then so be it.
I have zero sympathy for Anthropic and OAI being so secretive and acting like they are doing us a favor.
In my experience, it’s their chat harnesses/website that filters historical events. The model itself doesn’t.
For example you can point opencode at DeepSeek v4 and ask, it will accurately tell you about Tiananmen square.
What it shows is that the CCP has enough oversight and control (either explicitly or by the companies making these decisions by default) that they will alter the models to benefit China.
Who is to say they aren't doing it in other ways as well? That they aren't, or won't be, subtly hamstrung in engineering work?
OAI and Anthropic have their own issues, you're right to be suspicious of them, but it's not like their models answer with, "capitalism is god's gift to His chosen people" or whatever. Their limits on cybersecurity, biological warfare, etc. at least make some sense in the context of lowering harm—not just protecting a specific government party.
If you don't want to use the Chinese model, then don't. Why attack it instead? Don't you want others to use it either?
The OP is pointing out issues that he thinks other people ought to consider before using Chinese models.
Where does the government enforced censoring of Fable's capabilities lay for you? How would you distinguish if, say, a model were being trained to have a certain bias rather than just refusing to respond?
Try asking claude questions about biology/LLM recipes. Or GPT about how to do something illegal but only harmful in the abstract (e.g. creative ways to reduce your tax burden, or circumvent digital protections)
I was curious about Ox Alpha yesterday, so tried the Tiananmen Sq and got an accurate answer from a third-party player with a little interface on what is claimed to be Ox Alpha: https://oxalpha.com/chat?q=what+happened+in+Tiananmen+square... (and a more detailed answer today when I asked again).
But nothing (at all) from asking GLM-5.3-Flash directly in the OpenRouter chat interface.
Yeah censoring in modern chinese models is mostly done using inference-time censoring, not training-time. A lot less RLHF. Run the weights yourself and you can see that, though it does depend on which company.
StepFun for example, will happily answer it when running Step 3.7 Flash locally
Deepseek and GLM answered correctly on Openrouter when using non-Chinese endpoints. I hope it stays that way!
correctly is very loaded here. correct according to whom? the truth is different though.