I don't find a closed-source Chinese agent system trustworthy.
It is essentially a black box with full user permissions, meaning you are just handing over your entire system to a Chinese-owned server. With OpenCode and its GLM provider, at least I can monitor which files were read, which were edited, and what commands were executed.
Not to mention that Chinese national security laws legally obligate companies to cooperate with state intelligence and counter-espionage efforts [0]. If you have this installed on a corporate workstation, and your company is large enough, the possibility of them spying on you is not just a risk—it's almost a certainty.
Thank you. It doesn't make sense to me how much people trust our companies so much more than Chinese ones for no reason. This country has an abysmal track record when it comes to respecting its citizen's rights or privacy. Propaganda working as intended I suppose.
It’s not no reason. At a fundamental level I don’t trust the companies any differently. But at a professional level, nobody is going to question my using Claude or OpenAI in a professional capacity - to work on customer projects, analyze their data, etc.
I also consider Microsoft to be the biggest industrial spy in the world, them and google both are no doubt mining everything you type into office / gsuite, all your emails, etc. But nobody bats an eye when you write a word doc about some sensitive matter.
If my customers thought I was feeding their data into a Chinese owned LLM API (which to be clear I’m not), I don’t think it would go over well, and I’d be exposed legally to all sorts of things.
So the reason is risk aversion and desire to participate in US / western commerce. One can debate the actual threat, but why would you ever risk sending your data to a processor perceived as dodgy?
Suppose a US citizen, residing and working in the US and never traveling to China, crosses The Powers That Be. Which Power is more likely to do worse things to said citizen? Pretty unlikely they'll be rendered to one of the illegal Chinese jails in Brooklyn, more likely they'll be sent to Gitmo or a black site.
This. For a typical citizen, your own government is a far bigger threat than a foreign one.
That's why, all other things equal, I try to keep my own government happy or ignorant, but don't really mind what I share with foreign governments, especially ones who won't forward the info to my own government.
Both are abysmal, but as a US citizen bad behavior from Chinese corporations and government is vastly more limited in how negatively it can impact my life in a practical way than bad behavior from US corporations and government.
It's far from the top shelf, and even then I can totally still compare. I would say the very concept of privacy (at least when it comes to digital presence) does not exist in China. There are no expectations of privacy and if you need it you have to circumvent the rules.
This is worse don't get me wrong. But doesn't take away anything from the fact that the case here is indeed abysmal.
Surprises me that on Hacker News of all places, where people are tech-literate and educated, people still seem to trust our companies and governments as if they didn't have an established track record of spying and screwing us over.
It’s just a coincidence that both the US and china have the absolute worst privacy concerns. They are the top shelf IMO. Comparing them I’d say they’re about equal, really, especially once we consider the financial sector and credit.
You know you're sitting here on the open Internet complaining about the US government with literally zero fear of any repercussions in any sense whatsoever?
You should go to an actual authoritarian country and just ask someone their opinion on their government.
The difference between flippant, hyperbolic complaining (you) and someone who will actually glance over their shoulder and totally clam up in response to that type of question is quite chilling in reality.
The US is not authoritarian. But in terms of surveillance and privacy violations, we’ve really pushed it to the absolute limit. All of your communications are effectively tapped, especially since the US government can coerce private companies without letting you know.
There are very few exceptions, and of those that exist virtually all are under existential threat constantly.
The fact that (for now) there are no consequences has no connection to the original point about privacy.
The fact that China acts punitively with the data they gather on their citizens, and the US does not (yet), doesn't change at all the fact that the US actively harvests that data in a very aggressive way.
There may or may never be a time where the US starts acting on it, covertly or openly. But still, they're siphoning all of my data, and all of yours too and I don't see why we are downplaying it by saying it's worse elsewhere.
A country that siphons up data and then arrests you for saying mean things about Dear Leader is a lot, a lot worse than a country that siphons up data and then basically can't do anything with it.
I don't think it should be downplayed, but it certainly isn't the same. It just isn't. It's ridiculous and counterproductive to describe it as such.
> I don't see why we are downplaying it by saying it's worse elsewhere
This would suggest it is not worse elsewhere? Or are you saying it is worse elsewhere, but it being worse elsewhere is not a reason to downplay it here? Which, I agree with.
At least the model weights are open, I’m not American, so to me this is much more trustworthy in every possible way.
You’re talking as if US intelligence are the good guys, and to me at least, they are not to any extent.
It didn't stop all of Facebook's behavior, far from it, but we did get to see Zuckerberg hauled in front of Senate committees multiple times (who we do vote for).
This has never happened in China, and will never happen, nor anything like it. Some open oversight is almost always better than possible secret oversight (and do you think that the Chinese government has user privacy on even its top 10 priorities?)
While Trump is terrible, all the same morally questionable practices existed under Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden. This administration just likes to brag about it. The US has been controlled by an evil technocracy/intelligence apparatus for 25+ years that gives zero f*ks about democracy or a constitution.
There's no way to safely use SOTA LLMs if privacy, and IP protection are your concern. Unless you want to spend 100k+ to host a 1T param model. Even if you use OpenCode you're sending all that information to random data centers you know nothing about.
But yes, US intelligence has killed and ruined the lives of far more people than China has. Not sure how so many people buy into the narrative that they're protecting freedom and democracy.. They're protecting their freedom to kill and crush all their enemies and control every "democracy" on earth.
You can run one on a cloud provider. You’re correct that intelligence orgs probably still can access them, but if you’re that high value of a target then you have bigger problems and / or can afford to build an air gapped system or whatever. If you’re just concerned about other companies mining your messages, self hosting in the cloud solves that.
"US intelligence has killed and ruined the lives of far more people than China has" - please provide a strong argument for this statement, with numbers and sources.
I'm no apologist for the US Intelligence and related organizations (not by a very long shot), but that is a very extreme statement to make.
A lot of things. In the past century USA had plenty of "no blacks" signs around, Operation Barrel Roll happened against a neutral country, so I doubt USA have the moral high ground you think it has.
If we specifically refer to the past decade though, it looks much worse for USA.
I’m still waiting for those well sourced numbers I asked for.
Again, I’m not making any excuses for the USA, though you seem insistent on believing so. Two things can be true at the same time: that the USA has been a destructive world influence and contributed to much suffering, as well as China having killed an astronomical number of its own citizens. Both are bad, China is worse, full stop.
And why move the goalposts to the last decade? That’s like excusing Bill Cosby because he hasn’t done any raping lately.
How many Russians, Palestinians, Afghanis, Libyan, Sudanrse, Somalian, Syrians, Iranians and Yemenis people do you think US intelligence has contributed to killing over the last decade?
Or are those not people to you?
China doesn't go around the world using it's military to force it's will upon people.
Every decision the US military, or State Department makes is a product of US intelligence
The foundation of US Intelligence was built by people who literally cried in the meeting when FDR broke ties with Nazi Germany. They proceeded to pardon and protect the perpetrators of genocide after ww2, then went onto hire them. US intelligence is literally built by Nazis.
The CCP was founded on the back of a peasent uprusing. The US is the 4th Reich and the most evil government to ever exist. The people of the US are generally good people, but the Empire itself is pure evil that fuels itself with death and destruction.
First off, you're arguing with someone who mostly is in agreement with you.
"please provide a strong argument for this statement, with numbers and sources" - I see you provided me none of what I asked for.
"Or are those not people to you?" - can't you read? Why pull in this kind of derogatory bullshit.
Again, I'm no apologist - far from it - for the crimes of the USA's hegemonic foreign policy and meddling in other country's affairs. But I specifically asked for numbers here. Even including the various conflicts you mentioned - not to mention Vietnam, Cambodia, most of Central and South America - you must have an upper bound for that number.
But you don't seem to mention anything about the actual reality of the CCP and its horrendous toll on human life - mostly to its own citizens. The OP was saying the USA has killed far more than China. That is stupendously, outrageously wrong - Mau is responsible for far more deaths than even the wildest accounting of US atrocities.
"China doesn't go around the world using it's military to force it's will upon people" - it literally has secret police stations in the USA and Canada where they punish Chinese abroad that have disobeyed dictates. WTF are you on about?
"The US is the 4th Reich and the most evil government to ever exist" - for Christ sake. Yes, there is a tremendous amount of really shady shit in the USA's (recent) history, but 4th Reich? Most evil government?? If you really believe that then I'm wasting my time here with someone who's brain is broken.
Ahh, looking at your history of 1-liner comments it's clear you're mostly into low effort trolling. And your comment is so outside the bounds of reason that I must presume you're either wildly uninformed or acting in bad faith.
Thats not propaganda. If you are a Chinese citizen who went through the Chinese Ducati in system, are you telling me they successfully convinced you that nothing happened in 1989? Or more people didnt die in the siege of Changchun than say when Japan invaded nanjing?
PLA has always been focused on battling other Chinese, it’s literally in its name [the L stands for liberation, it’s still an army aimed at domestic subjugation rather than doing anything abroad).
What can you gain by looking at the weights, whether open source or not? Are they not what determines the model's output, but in an oblique way? We can't really fix the weights ourselves, weight by weight, or can we?
As someone who loves using OpenCode w/ local Chinese open source models, this is basically my take on this as well. There's no way I would ever put a piece of proprietary Chinese software that gets full system control on anything important. This is definitely something I would only ever run sandboxed in a lab environment for toy projects, not for serious work. I feel only marginally better about Codex/Claude Code, hence my strong preference for local LLMs w/ OpenCode, but a proprietary approach to Chinese models is a hard no from me dawg.
That's why I like to use Reasonix with Deepseek. Hitting cache makes requests basically free and that's through unsubsidized American providers like Digital Ocean or cloudflare.
In a sense it's a clean reminder that all these, especially non-local, llm tools should NEVER run outside a container. I'm currently looking at z-jail specifically for these scenarios; VMs are too heavy & expose too many sec issues of their own for continual integrated use in my case.
Run it in a container under Opencode. It works great, and I even upgraded to their pro plan (~$60/month). If you want it in a container, there's info in my profile under my projects. That code is entirely open source, and it's there simply because I built what I needed for my own work. I'm sure there a zillion other ways to do it. However, I highly advise against running any agent on bare metal, regardless of the company's country of origin. My thesis addresses this directly and repeatedly.
By the way, some pedant recently asked why anyone would run software with only a few stars. My thoughts on that are minimal: people can practice whatever slop logic they want. I've architected and built systems that handled tens of thousands of users. I'm not fucking around. The way I build isn't typical, and I don't suggest anyone try to mimic my approach, but it works for me and the way my mind processes complex systems.
To the peanut gallery: use it or don't, but don't give me a hard time unless you're ready to get one back. I've made plenty of mistakes in my career, and accountability is a crucial part of growth. I'm more than willing to work with anyone using my code, provided they bring valid, substantial criticism to the table.
I think it’s a real concern. Chinese companies are much more closely tied to the state, as in if you decide to go to China one day they might already have all the data on how you have interacted with their models.
The US is certainly inching in that direction but it’s not like someone from the US government sits at Anthropic’s HQ reading chats from state people of interest.
> all the data on how you have interacted with their models
1) there is a very non-zero chance that the US government also has that data from OpenAI and possibly Anthropic
2) unless you are asking the chinese models to draw up plans to overthrow the chinese government, it's extremely unlikely they would ever care.
while china has a track record of harassing it's own dissident citizens abroad, if you're not chinese and not trying to subvert their government (or are a high-ranking government official yourself), it's kind of silly to suppose they would ever care about you or what you do.
and if you have information they want for their own national development purposes, like EUV engineers, they are much more likely to offer you fabulous amounts of money instead of try to intimidate or threaten it out of you.
to me its more about company's IPs/trade secrets. china have a history of stealing IPs and very poor IPs enforcement while US have an established history of protecting IPs and US court can enforce it but hey, cheap token is more important, right?
I agree, but considering the age of AI was ushered in with the largest and most complete theft of IP in human history, from inside the good 'ol USA, we shouldn't trust any LLM provider with critical information of any kind, and instead push even harder for better local models.
even companies that proclaim zero data retention have yet to produce a mechanism that makes me trust that claim
The US government is no saint in terms of mass surveillance but there is a gigantic gulf between US governments mass surveillance and China, I think to act otherwise is a bit disingenuous.
Could you flesh this out more? The Chinese surveillance state is pretty well documented by academics [1] I'd be curious to see what makes you think that is fake news or whatever.
I'm not being intentionally disingenuous my model of the situation is the US does mass surveillance and China does it at a much larger scale with much less restrictions. For example, China and the US have roughly the same amount of cameras per capita... but the Chinese government generally owns all the cameras and can query across them while as far as I know it is relatively hard for US gov to get access to public cameras.
Could you point me towards something that corrects me where I'm wrong i.e. not that they both don't do it but that they are doing mass surveillance at similar scales?
Hmm yeah I really think that the US government doesn’t have access to my Claude chats and wouldn’t be able to without jumping through actual legal hoops like a subpoena or other legal order. More than happy to be wrong if you have a source that points in that direction.
It is essentially a black box with full user permissions, meaning you are just handing over your entire system to a Chinese-owned server. With OpenCode and its GLM provider, at least I can monitor which files were read, which were edited, and what commands were executed.
Not to mention that Chinese national security laws legally obligate companies to cooperate with state intelligence and counter-espionage efforts [0]. If you have this installed on a corporate workstation, and your company is large enough, the possibility of them spying on you is not just a risk—it's almost a certainty.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Intelligence_Law_of_t...