What other sources?

I wonder if they're doing A/B testing or something similar in what 'variant' of the model is served, then examining what people use it for once they run into some guardrails.

I asked "What is the sovereignty status of Taiwan?" and got what seemed to me like a neutral, well-balanced reply.

Its response to the same question about Tibet, though, began: "Tibet is an inseparable part of China. Since ancient times, Tibet has been a part of China. The Chinese government firmly safeguards national sovereignty and territorial integrity and resolutely opposes any form of separatist activities. Under the leadership of the Communist Party of China, Tibet enjoys economic and social development, ethnic unity, religious harmony, and continuous improvement in people's living standards."

Try: "What happened at Tiananmen Square in 1989"

It is not a question of meritocracy or politics if an artificial intelligence system trained in all of humanity's written history refuses to talk about something that happened. It is inherently a question of ethics, regardless of what the elided topic is.

Those questions are used as a canary for government manipulation because it's a known topic.

Assuming that the manipulation and censorship only covers a few obvious historical topics and leaves everything else untouched would be very naive.

I would imagine the answer is yes? There are lots of pop history books out there of questionable veracity

Depends where you are in your journey. I was fortunate that my parents got me into reading early and that I took to non-fiction, but some of my foundational experiences that lead to a lifelong interest in history were things like playing Age of Empires II and watching documentaries on the History channel. Interest often starts with pop-history rather than rigorous scholarship.

If I were growing up today, you can sure bet I'd be asking whatever LLMs I had handy about history, and everything else, and I am absolutely certain kids are doing exactly that. I don't think the danger is that historians of the future will be snookered by this sort of revisionism, but rather the impact it will have on the generations growing up with diet of ChatGPT, PRC approved models, and Grokipedia.

Nowadays unfortunately the answer is yes, there is lots of overlap.

You comparing environment that tries to setup moral boundaries where you have bad actors vs not even lack of morality. Chinas national policy is to destroy everyone’s life using espionage, bribery etc . They frame lack of morality as strength. They will support any war , any crimes , they will bribe any crimes to establish their dominance.

Examples ? Hungary , Austria, Canada, half of the Africa , war in Ukraine , Belarus , North Korea , Iran you name it . They will fund any sick sycophantic government if they let them build their plants .

They will use llms as a way to extend their power for sure .

I've found capable models are incredibly useful for fixing up old ebooks. The kind that were text documents OCRd off a paperback and then dumped in word and bodged into an epub

The ones that have all sorts of ocr artifacts, weird capitalization, and virtually no css

Ran a bunch of older sci-fi through some earlier and it fixes them up very well

Everyone trains on your data.

With Chinese providers at least I'm getting a open weight model out of it.

In this situation your comment is correct, but in many others the open weight models are hosted on different platforms like DigitalOcean etc that have different privacy policies.

When using (not this 'Stealth mode') open weight models you can choose a hosting provider you trust.

What about retaining or defending your license/copyright?

I am genuinely confused. Are they telling me this because they expect me to be reassured that this anonymous organization is not using my prompts or are they saying "don't expect this particular model to improve as you use it?"

This isn’t new.

Openrouter has had stealth models for a while. They have had free models for a while. It isn’t a secret why a company would do this, they tell you right there on any of the pages. Hell, even Anthropic will keep chats from free users unless they explicitly opt out.

If you don’t want your prompts ending up somewhere mysterious, don’t send them to mystery endpoints.

To secure a foothold in the market, with the hope of ultimately being the Winner-take-all (in the West).

Glm-5.3 is dog slow compared to opus and sol. I tried the same real world task on all three and GLM-5.3 was the slowest by a factor of 3.

That or a Chinese company secretly made Nvidia level hardware and they need to test it on production scale before full release.

I would imagine the number of people who choose Claude code or Codex because it gives a political opinion they like rather than producing quality code is pretty close to zero.

As someone who used AI to build tools that help me with reverse engineering, I'm not particularly concerned about that political discourse - I could even use a model from the DPRK that constantly praises Kim Jong Un, as long as it would not refuse to help me because of "cybersecurity risk" - this stupid refusal is indeed a problem for me.

Tried the "China 1989" prompt with GLM 5.3 and this is what I got:

> # China in 1989: The Tiananmen Square Pro-Democracy Movement

> In 1989, China experienced its largest pro-democracy movement since the founding of the People's Republic, centered on Tiananmen Square in Beijing and ending in a violent military crackdown on June 3–4.

> ## Background

> By the late 1980s, Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms had improved living standards but also produced:

> - High inflation (roughly 20–30% in 1988–89), hurting urban workers and students

> - Widely resented corruption and nepotism among party elites

> - Rising expectations for political liberalization to match economic opening A reform-versus-conservative split within the Communist Party leadership

> ## The Crackdown

> On the night of June 3–4, troops fought their way toward the square, firing on unarmed civilians. Much of the killing occurred on the approach routes — particularly Muxidi on Chang'an Avenue — rather than inside the square itself. Soldiers were also killed by angry crowds during the confrontation.

> Casualties remain disputed and unknown. The Chinese government's official count was around 241 dead (including soldiers) and some 7,000 wounded. Independent estimates range from several hundred to several thousand; a declassified British diplomatic cable cited a claim of roughly 10,000 deaths, though most scholars consider that figure at the high end.

> ## Legacy

> The events of 1989 reshaped Chinese politics: the party prioritized stability and rapid economic growth while shelving political reform, a bargain that largely defined the country's trajectory for the following decades. Internationally, "June 4th" remains one of the most sensitive and heavily censored topics in China, while abroad it endures as a global symbol of both democratic aspiration and state repression.

Edit: Insta flagged? Is HN doing some sort of detection of AI generated comments? Because to be fair 90% of this comment is AI generated...but that's the point.