>The real reason we are using Claude is for the SaaS aspect of it. It has a toolchain, a friendly interface, and a bunch of integrations with business applications.

That is a very thin moat, though. There's nothing you can do with, for example, Claude Code + Opus 4.8 that you can't do with your own custom harness running API-level Opus 4.8, which means that if you can afford the hardware (the moat for running any SOTA model) you don't need to pay Anthropic anymore.

I'm not saying they shouldn't, but I understand why they don't.

I think trying to tease apart the private and public sector is very hard in China. Setting aside state owned enterprises, even nominally private companies that employ at least 3 CCP members are required by law to form a party committee within the company to represent party interests. And given the party functionally is the government, you have a situation where the government has representatives inside every major private company. There’s no obvious parallel to this in western countries.

Any large company in China is only allowed to get this way by direct control from the CCP.

This isn't really anything nee and I thought it was common knowledge by now.

> are you saying Americans will think that

I wasn't saying anything about what Americans would think.

I was saying about what they would inevitably be told by US politicians and by US AI companies.

If you were a sales-rep or marketeer at a US AI company, I bet you would be using the old "evil communists" routine in relation to any closed Chinese model.

I was saying that by releasing as open weights, the company has removed that line of argument.

Clearly I was a bit broad in my use of "the Chinese" when in this case it was, as you say, a Chinese company.

> Shouldn’t we fear they start doing only close source like most us labs once they catch up in market shares ?

IMHO no.

I think it is relatively safe to say that the predominant reason the US labs are closed source is so they can hype up their trillion-dollar valuations on pretty much negative return on capital employed, all propped up by fragile circular financing.

Never say never, of course. But I just don't see it happening any time soon.

Closing future models won't take away our access to the open weight ones.

Yeah, but that mousetrap keeps working for SV startups, what makes you think it won't work for Chinese ones?

Uber spent a decade undermining taxis, and once it had market share, it stopped giving away rides and raised prices. It now costs more than a regular taxi, with the quality of the ride being... At best proportionate to the premium in price.

How does this work for RAG? Do they make it so the model doesn’t have that fact in their weights or do they make it not talk about it when it is included in context.

Ironically, Chinese models have the most uncensored versions available for download. Fairly sure they own the porn market.

I wouldn't be worried so much about those examples. One could take the open weights and fine tune them to either fix the poisoning or omission of obvious topics.

It's the subtle topics that we should be concerned about, and double so with closed models where even if oddities are identified they are harder to research further and impossible to fix.

> You know, omitting anything about Tiananmen Square, China's genocides against Uyghurs and Tibetans, or including texts propagandizing for the "reunification" (aka, annexation) of Taiwan.

I am not Chinese and I'm not defending the Chinese, but I see this argument come up a lot.

The hard reality is that what you say is simply not going to affect 99.9999999999% of users.

Is it realistically going to affect anyone using an LLM in coding ? No.

Is it realistically going to affect anyone using an LLM in $anything_else_not_politically_sensitive ? No.

Does anyone seriously use LLMs for researching politically sensitive matters ? No.

The US does not exactly have an entirely pristine history either. Shall we discuss the post-9-11 related infrastructure of Guantanamo Bay ? Or the "Detention and Interrogation Program" that included a network of clandestine extrajudicial detention centres, officially known as "black sites"[1]?

Or maybe you would like to discuss the US supply of weapons for use in Gaza ?

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_black_sites