Unrestricted Warfare by Colonels Xiangsui and Liang is a must read. China's been on the path for quite a while.

China deliberately adopted western style market institutions. They joined the WTO. No, they aren't a fully westernized market, but they are closer to a competitive marketplace than the state dictating all of what will or will not be built.

I'm confused, what has America and the west lost the plot on? You would have preferred the west to exploit China more?

This framing of a zero sum game is counterproductive.

its the natural conclusion of raw unregulated capitalism. Without guiderails, we offshored all production (because it was cheaper), and we suffered a complete loss of manufacturing workforce. Now that Trump has gone full protectionist, we have nothing with which to manufacture from. It's beautifully ironic in a way, in that our greed will be our downfall.

Of course china isnt innocent in all of this. Their 996 work culture is inhuman, and basically indentured service. But, their government is able to leverage that workforce.

> Note that China itself is a protectionist economy. So in some sense protectionism is recognizing that China has a pretty good industrial policy and copying it.

China's protectionism is emplaced to support long-term goals. Amodei's policy suggestion is explicitly in support of short term goals (1-5 years), a time window he claims to be "critical" without evidence. A cynic may link that window to forthcoming AI IPO's, and allowing current CEOs to secure ridiculous golden parachutes before leaving the mess of how to deal with the unpaced Chinese frontier models to their successors and future US legislature.

Letting AI companies set your foreign policy (voluntarily ceding global primacy to maximize domestic[1] profits) may have awful higher-order effects for the US. What's hilarious is the shameless about-face: for years, the same companies have been declaring that it is vital American AI innovation not be encumbered by new laws. Until the Chinese models glided to the frontier.

1. Maybe they hope to browbeat Europe too, like how they pushed out Huawei equipment from Euro telecoms. An alternative reading is that the loss of primacy is involuntary, so they may as well spin the reality, and salvage a win by colluding to eliminate better, open-weight models from the markets in "democracies" with the excuse that they are unpaced and therefore dangerous. What will predictibly happen is there will be `Qwen-8.1` for RoW, and a lobotomized `Qwen-8.1-paced` for Americans.

> outside the tier 1 cities people were living in makeshift subsistence tin housing

Having visited the US a few times it felt that way too

> According to Bloomberg, supply bottlenecks for high-end memory and other key components could limit chip production this year. Since Huawei also has to serve other customers, DeepSeek might have to wait over a year for the full delivery, estimates Bloomberg.

Like I said, it will delay the Chinese labs for a couple years. These are not even top-line chips.

Frankly, China was not going to allow them to depend on NVIDIA forever, I don't think this motivates domestic production that much over the counterfactual. If NVIDIA didn't have export controls, China was going to set up formal import controls. They want to own their entire supply chain.

You might want to consider a local setup? Personally I do model + llama.cpp + Pi + tmux, that's as barebones as you can get and everything is great. I also use opencode for bigger task, I could probably hook that to a local model but I'm not sure (still new to this). But if you work with sensitive data you need a local setup purely.

I’m biased (my wife works there) but Fireworks or another US-based inference provider is going to be a better fit than OpenRouter. Fireworks has zero data retention by default[1] and has tools to make it easy to run your existing harness against open models [2]

OpenRouter isn’t a provider, they route to other providers, so you would need to specify which ones you’re comfortable with anyway.

[1]:https://docs.fireworks.ai/guides/security_compliance/data_ha...

[2]:https://fireworks.ai/nexus

Openrouter lets you pick your provider and see their policy re retention and training. You can pick US providers e.g. digitalocean that don’t retain or train on your data. Openrouter is also now owned by stripe, so I don’t see any reason why using them with a trusted provider is riskier than using the big two (especially in light of some of the whole Navier Stokes thing)

If it’s really sensitive then don’t use a cloud provider.

Depending on what your threat model is, and how much you trust OpenRouter and their upstream providers, they offer zero data retention (googleable: ZDR) APIs which come at a higher cost. You can find other zdr providers as well.

I think this would depend upon the level of sensitive data.

For OpenRouter, you can setup an API key and limit it to only models that claim to not train on data, but that is just a claim. You can then use trust to judge which providers will honor that claim.

But if the data is really sensitive, you might want either a local model or a business subscription with some big name in the US that legally promises no data training.

So are we talking some app idea you are playing around with, or files filled with PHI/PII that you have legal mandates to safeguard? If the latter, I would stick to only provider with enterprise agreements to not store/train on the data. Even the ones who promise no training are likely storing the data for monitoring for abuse or such short term.

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Move fast and break passengers