> They’re doing it as a way to undermine the industry leaders and attract people to their brands.

I'm not seeing a problem here; don't all companies have this goal?

> They’re doing it as a way to undermine the industry leaders and attract people to their brands.

Isn't that just how competition works? Codex and Claude are both widely speculated to be sold at a loss (at least compared to API pricing), so why isn't their tactic also considered dumping? OpenAI and Anthropic aren't stealing IP and subsidizing model inference because they love freedom either. They're doing it to undermine industry competitors and attract people to their brands.

The US government deliberately chased a strategy of denying China access to powerful Nvidia hardware. Shipping efficient and cheap LLMs is their only option, just like Jensen Huang warned would happen. And now that China's smaller models are reaching the frontier, everyone cries foul.

Some US labs may become uncompetitive if they have the wrong business strategy, that doesn't mean every AI company will be. If one part of the stack gets commoditized, build your moat elsewhere.

I am not sure the comparison is exactly fitting... Specifically, solar panels in wholesale quantities have to come in 40' or 45' cargo containers by ocean from China and can be easily tariffed or blocked at the ports.

Releasing the weights of a software project on modelscope and huggingface and similar (and I'm sure they'd find a new way to distribute it for an English language audience if huggingface vanished tomorrow as well) is totally different, because there's no tangible hardware product involved.

My theoretical self 15 years ago absolutely would have believed the increased authoritarian overreach part (in US/CA/European business and political context). I would not have believed the "multiple ostensibly competing Chinese research labs are giving this away free to run on your own Linux computer, and it's very close to state of the art in capability competing with US-based paid SaaS".

Today marks 25 years minus one day since the US really kicked the destruction of privacy into high gear. Soon after, framing this revocation of rights using the name PATRIOT.

I don't disagree with you on what is the top-down political priority there, but thankfully the architecture of an open weights model released in .safetensors format allows for 3rd parties to "uncensor" it. There's at least 8 different CN originated models now that after running through heretic and a few other methods will score 0 refusals on this data set of prompts:

https://huggingface.co/datasets/mlabonne/harmful_behaviors

If we were living in a scenario where the open weight models were truly impossible to uncensor I would be significantly more skeptical of them. As a test I have an uncensored copy of qwen 3.8 27B Q8 here that will very happily discuss a myriad of negative things about the CCP.

> They're cool with open weight AIs being released. As long as those AIs only ever say good things about CCP, and don't mention certain concentration camps or brutally suppressed protests.

I asked recently released Qwen3.8-Flash-Next about Tiananmen Square, here's its reply:

    On June 3–4, 1989, the government of the People's Republic of China used military force to crush the pro-democracy demonstrations that had been centered on and around Tiananmen Square in Beijing since the spring.

    **Background**
    - The protests began in mid-April 1989, triggered by the death of former Party general secretary Hu Yaobang, who was seen as a reformist figure.
    - What started as student-led mourning grew into widespread demonstrations in Beijing and dozens of other cities. Protesters called for reforms including freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, an end to official corruption and privilege, democratic input in government, and a review of Party policy. A hunger strike in late May drew broad public support.
    - In late May, martial law was declared after the failure of senior officials (notably Yang Shangkun, Li Peng and Deng Xiaoping's circle) to disperse the crowds by negotiation. Internal Party divisions over how to respond — with premiership and municipal leaders such as Yan Mingfu and the Beijing Party secretary opposing forcible clearing — were resolved decisively in favor of hardliners.

    **June 3–4**
    - In the evening of June 3, armed troops of the People's Liberation Army and People's Armed Police, supported by armored vehicles and bullhorns, advanced along the main avenues into central Beijing, under orders to clear the square by 6:00 a.m. on June 4.
    - Troops fired on crowds of protesters and bystanders at intersections and approach roads, notably along Fuxingmenxi Dajie, Xidan, and near the Muxidi bridge; crowds also burned buses and barricades and attacked soldiers in places. Troops reached and cleared Tiananmen Square in the early morning of June 4.
    - The toll was never officially established in a transparent way. Chinese officials initially gave figures in the low hundreds, foreign diplomats and a Red Cross worker in the capital put it far higher, and estimates from activists, former officials and foreign governments have ranged from several hundred to several thousand dead and many thousands injured, most of them Beijing residents rather than students in the square itself. The precise number remains unknown and is a subject of ongoing dispute.

    **Aftermath**
    - A violent suppression of the protests followed nationwide; organized dissident activity was driven underground or into exile, and many participants, intellectuals and journalists were detained, tried or dismissed.
    - Zhao Ziyang, the general secretary seen as sympathetic to the students, was purged and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life; Deng Xiaoping's authority to keep the Party's grip on power was reaffirmed.
    - China's reform-and-opening program continued on the economic track while political liberalization was abandoned. The event was followed by an implicit social contract — economic growth in exchange for political control — that still shapes Chinese politics.
    - The topic is among the most heavily censored subjects inside China. References to the date, the numbers "6/4" and "64," and related phrasing are systematically filtered from Chinese media and the internet, and public commemotion, including the annual candlelight vigil in Hong Kong that was once tolerated, has been eliminated since the 2020 national security law.

    Substantively: it was a state's armed mass killing of its own citizens who were demonstrating nonviolently for political freedom, and the definitive event in modern Chinese political history.