My mental bias always kept me away from Chinese models. Because i know that china is a surveillance state and all the things we know about CCP. But after what we learned about OpenAI and how they most likely used user data to basically cheat in an open competition i think it does not matter which AI provider you use all of them will own your data and all of them can spy on you. So I am willing to switch to Chinese models. This way we help them develop and improve models some day we can run them locally.

The Chinese labs have released interesting papers to accompany their releases too, especially DeepSeek and Kimi. This improves their standing among a few of us, who really like to see and read the papers with details about what they have changed and how their models work.

the US is also a surveillance state except about 80% of the surveillance is private companies (that are closely tied to the state)

These models are open-weights. Anyone can host them, you don’t have to use chinese servers even though most of them offer zero data-retention policies.

Even you think both cheat, you can't possibly think they both cheat the same amount.

The new meta model is fast and very cheap as well, and when used through OpenCode you get quite a lot of free tokens. But meta is also THE surveillance company, so probably also not a good choice in your case.

You can use those models from Openrouter, they have many Non-Chinese providers.

You're naive if you're thinking the scumbags running the US companies aren't using your data.

In any case old rules apply: if privacy is a concern don't share the data. I share all my work-related code because it's worthless, but I don't and would never share company business and process details, access to production/user data, etc.

Meanwhile I know of people connecting all the kind of MCPs for datadog/sentry/jira/concluce/production databases to their harnessess..lol.