There are zero reasons to have any less concerns about ideological biases, side effects of the mechanisms used to implement ideological biases, or code backdoors in a US model, and a supplier of open (as opposed to hosted) model weights is not an active ongoing partner with whom the idea of supply chain risk from possible future divergence of interests is coherent, so that concern is either invalid or, if the “partner” is the model itself, simply a restatement of the ideological bias in the model weights concerns which, again, is not diminished by the model having a US origin.

And your speculation about future protectionist regulation is just that, not an actual fact.

>There are zero reasons to have any less concerns about ideological biases, side effects of the mechanisms used to implement ideological biases, or code backdoors in a US model

If you are a US based critical infrastructure provider, I'd argue that you have already accepted a baked-in threat of ideological misalignment from the US, but you have not accepted it from farther away countries like China.

>a supplier of open (as opposed to hosted) model weights is not an active ongoing partner with whom the idea of supply chain risk from possible future divergence of interests is coherent

I disagree. Models are improving so quickly that you'd probably not want to freeze yourself on an older model forever. You likely want to continue to upgrade models. The best way to do this is to build a sufficiently powerful and representative benchmark that you can confidently move to _any_ model, but you might expect that future models from the same providers that you accepted before will show less divergence than totally new providers. Similarly, if you build your inference around one of their custom tools (e.g. DeepInfer rather than vLLM), you might find substantial switching costs in moving away to another provider.

>And your speculation about future protectionist regulation is just that, not an actual fact.

It's not a done deal for sure, but you can already see a lot of signs of this in recent actions from the government. I can tell you based on personal experience that some customers will automatically rule out any Chinese models.

I think the only point being is that if you see US as homogeneous and you are from the US then it’s okay to use an US model because it’s values will be signed with yours. But that is pretty weak anyway.