Yeah look, I don’t have a say in it. Also, the whole Chinese putting backdoors into routers hasn’t helped any.

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/researchers-disco...

Did you actually try to convince them?

Again, this requirement is incredibly silly. Here, look at this (it's a link to AA; I shortened it since the link's huge):

https://tinyurl.com/2dhzdrt6

Right now, the best US-based open-weight model (Inkling) has 42 points and is 975B parameters. The best Chinese open-weight model has 60 points. Also, note, Qwen3.8-27B on low thinking beats Inkling here and gets 43 points.

Of course, AA scores are definitely not bulletproof and there is a certain amount of benchmaxxing going on, but the point stands -- it is *incredibly* silly to limit yourself to US-only models, just because of an imagined threat that doesn't exist. Let me state this in stronger terms: whoever decided this for you is clueless. They might have the authority to override you, but it's your job to tell them that the only thing this achieves is essentially pointing a gun at your own foot and pulling the trigger.