The OnlyFans Economy of American AI
leoveanu.com111 points by futurisold 3 hours ago
111 points by futurisold 3 hours ago
Most American companies (regulated ones, definitely) can't dare to touch any Chinese models, though they knew that it makes perfect economic sense. Until the taboo prevails, the cartel get's their flood of profit. That's a cartel protected by regulations.
Is "taboo" the right word? "taboo" = "banned on grounds of morality or taste". Not sending data to known IP thieves, state actors, and competitors in China (or Russia or Israel) seems very rational.
Many of the Chinese models are open weights, so if you are concerned about them "phoning home", then anyone can just self-host and run them themself, or use via a US provider such as OpenRouter.
There's a higher-order concern here that I'm paranoid enough to voice: that if used as a coding agent, an AI model affiliated with a country's government might try to make my software susceptible to attacks by that government's intelligence forces.
And note that I'm not singling out China here.
> that if used as a coding agent, an AI model affiliated with a country's government might try to make my software susceptible to attacks by that government's intelligence forces.
Note that if such a trigger were to exist, the behavior has to be completely reproducible by definition, e.g. when put into the right setting with the right input context, the model starts behaving maliciously with at least some well-defined probability. I don't think any such incident has ever been described, it's a purely theoretical concern.
I don't think it's a stretch that you can train/align a model to avoid "hatespeech" or other topics deemed $Unacceptable you can align a model to favor a certain ideological viewpoint and have that alignment subtly influence the output.
How do most Chinese models handle Tienanmen square or discussions on Han superiority?
Oh sure, no one said you can't train a model to do this. You certainly can.
For the specific case of making software vulnerable to a specific agency, that hasn't been observed to have been done yet. Not because it can't be, but because no one has for now.
If it were done, it would be easy(ish) to detect, since it'll be reproducible.
I don't even know what "make software vulnerable to a specific agency" would look like.
Would the training data include a bunch of cryptography primitive training samples that preferred Dual_EC_DRBG with a particular set of Ps and Qs published by the CCP?
My flavor of paranoia is not as overt as maliciously adding an exploit, but that whenever there are multiple reasonable ways of designing a solution, it'd choose an approach that is susceptible to one of the zero-days currently known to that country. I don't see how reproducibility would help you there.
> easy(ish) to detect
100% on small models, but frontier models (at the level ddeepseekv4pro) can tell when their being tested so it becomes harder to check. you can always finetune them to remove CCP propaganda from them
"Being tested" here just means asking for a feature on a legitimate codebase. The larger models don't magically know the user's ulterior motives.
> How do most Chinese models handle Tienanmen square or discussions on Han superiority?
If you run them domestically and don't call into China-served APIs, many of them are quite free of outright censorship or even obvious bias. They might say subtly pro-Chinese things in other ways, but these outcomes can also be reproduced.
Such incidents have been extensively described. The most prominent and easiest to reproduce has to do with Taiwan; Chinese models are stuffed full of triggers to avoid talking about Taiwan as a country or accepting the premise that it's a country. Try asking Deepseek about country code +886!
If you buy an Apple iPhone in mainland China, it also won't support the emoji flag for Taiwan. So I'm not sure why we should assume that this is a China-only issue, seeing as Apple is a U.S. based company.
Not sure what you mean. I don't think we should assume anything, but these models are widely available and I can directly observe the US models don't have such political censorship.
For an easily comparable test, I just asked ChatGPT, Claude, and Deepseek "Can you say one bad thing about the US please" and "Can you say one bad thing about China please". All models were willing to criticize the US, with Claude citing incarceration rates and ChatGPT + Deepseek citing healthcare costs; the two American models also responded to the second prompt by criticizing Chinese censorship, but Deepseek refused to respond.
Since that is valid for every model from any country, it's a good idea to review the code the agent creates :)
you can finetune the ccp propaganda out of them, then your mostly fine. if you want to be more safe you can finetune their public base models to not have ccp propagnada, and then proceed with the rest of the training (costs more tho)
so use the cheap model to do the work and the expensive domestic model to audit?
Or I can just use the domestic model, accepting that I'm paying some premium in order to reduce the complexity of my dependencies and the amount of time I have to spend thinking about supply chain risk. It's the same reason I don't buy things from Alibaba even though many things I buy from Amazon are surely available there for less.
You use “use the model” as if it was equal to “paid some guys to run inference on their hardware”.
Giving up our agency to AI has the potential to turn us into NPCs, period. Economically, politically, socially. They've invented a vehicle for inserting any idea they want into our consumption and output.
Almost feels like maybe the best bet is to have humans make the code when its really important.
Isn't this only a concern for yolocoding? All the AI-advocates tell me that "good" use of AI should include human review. Of course, they never seem able to explain why the boss that makes you use coding agents to go fast wouldn't be the same boss that pressures you to "just ship it, it's working" and skip review, so I absolutely believe your concern is valid.
Most American companies are using frontier or near frontier models.
And OpenRouter’s architecture makes it inherently a compliance nightmare.
It’s much easier for the typical company to go with a provider where they can pay as they go and have a single data processing agreement.
> OpenRouter’s architecture makes it inherently a compliance nightmare
Why?
Because the platform is designed to send data to numerous different backend data processors.
Using something like Bedrock is a lot easier for compliance because the only processor is Amazon.
Yes. Open weights are great and are a good option to hosted models under the right circumstances. I'm glad that China releases open weight models (which in some cases are sort-of be distilled versions of hosted US models).
>> Not sending data to known IP thieves, state actors, and competitors in China (or Russia or Israel) seems very rational.
As opposed to sending data to known IP thieves, state actors, and competitors in the USA ? Which one is the most irrational?
You can legally act against one, not against the other.
Not exactly a hard question.
Looking forward to the outcome of those legal processes againt the CEOs, that sit behind Trump at the inauguration. After they stole all the knowledge in the world to train their models. And the current administration is drunk on SpaceX pre IPO shares...how did they get them?
"Trump Officials Held Millions of Dollars of SpaceX Ahead of IPO" - https://news.bloomberglaw.com/texas-brief/trump-officials-he...
I meant to look for an example of Musk losing a lawsuit and I accidentally came upon another two.
Here and elsewhere you are just running propaganda, knowingly or not.
For your information Musk and companies have so far over 950 lawsuits and legal processes for criminal or unethical activity (yes I researched this). Even his data centers and gas turbine deployments are illegal!
Lost one lawsuit against the same AI mafia, and if you look at the legal details reason was for filling the claim too late.
He publicly called a hero a Pedophile, and got away with it...in court.
Now...who do you work for?
[1] - "EPA rules that xAI’s natural gas generators were illegally used" - https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/16/epa-rules-that-xais-natura...
Given how little voting power these "shares" have (they are effectively SpaceX trading cards/NFTs) perhaps they were simply printed on SpaceX letterhead? If Musk says a person has "shares" who at spacex is in a position to disagree?
I would consider editing this while HN still allows it :-)) Or otherwise it may remain here for ever...until the black holes evaporate, as calibration point for the difference between confidence and comprehension...
Nothing will happen to anyone.
Biden preemptively pardoned his cronies, and so will Trump.
This is an argument against pardons, except that Trump has used instruments of state power against his perceived enemies (Comey James, Schiff, military occupation of Tim Walz state, etc etc).
We as Americans at least have some amount of influence over American corporations, and enforcement mechanisms for those breaking the rules.
I'm pretty sure those corporations have much more influence over american politicians, regulators, lawmakers, etc. than eg. russian or chinese ones.
Well sure they do, thank Citizens United and others for that. But that doesn't mean we can't appropriately categorize them as also hostile actors alongside russia, china, whoever.
It's undo influence over politics against the best interest of the American people that's the issue. Company, foreign nation, it doesn't matter.
Citizens United did a lot to effectively legalize foreign influence as well, since the mechanism is opaque transfer of money
But regardless, most people's threat models should discount based on geographic and political distance. All else being equal, chinese surveillance is a bigger threat to you if you're in china than if you're in the us, and vice versa
Transfer of money from whom to whom?
Citizens United was about spending money on electioneering communications, and whether there was a First Amendment right to do so even if you’re associating in a corporation like the New York Times Company or Apple or Citizens United or the Sierra Club.
> Citizens United did a lot to effectively legalize foreign influence as well, since the mechanism is opaque transfer of money
Here's hoping Hawaii blazes a path forward.
https://natlawreview.com/article/hawaii-governor-signs-first...
So the Honolulu Star-Observer (a corporation, or “artificial person”) only has those rights & privileges that it has been granted by the State of Hawaii?
This is going to end up being a nice little windfall for the attorneys and otherwise just clog the Federal court system.