None of those companies are created by the Chinese government. They're obviously subject to the Chinese government, whose whims may change at any given moment, but as we're seeing at the moment, so are the American companies.

And while I don't have a very positive view of the Chinese government, last I checked, they haven't been dropping bombs on innocent schoolchildren recently.

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

Bombs are a bit of a non sequitur here. The point is that Chinese companies are demonstrably hostile to American ones historically (and threatening in some specific structural ways to the American consumer). The presentation may be similar but to attribute American ethics to a Chinese decision is dubious.