Are you actually planning on travelling out of the country right now? It's probably not a good idea even if you don't use Chinese products, which by the way you definitely do.
The people that travel out of the country are typically not the same ones aligned with the current administration. The vast majority of the MAGA base are more likely to not have a passport, while a large portion have probably never left their state.
Just run a local model or run deepseek from another provider with a policy you like. The models are open weight and widely available. Still cheaper than chatgpt and anything else through 3rd parties
this is the pitch - it's open source, run it yourself. But >99% of people will not have the hardware needed to run these models at a high enough quality to be close to SOTA. So they will run the open-source models on CCP systems for a good price.
The only moat is the us trying to buy all the compute hardware in the world for the next two years. Then China, amd, etc are just making their own chips.
Qwen 3.6 supports reasonable agentic programming. People are vibe coding with it. It's really not that far off. If you truly cannot make a model that was SOTA 6-12 months ago work for you today for free I don't want to know what your needs are.
Unless you're very careful, it's trivial to have my secrets to be sent to the LLM. If it reads your .env just to see the variable names, the secrets have been sent to the servers. Now - they probably don't care about you and your secrets - but it makes me more uncomfortable that they have them.
This is true of anthropic or openai - but for some reason I think the us govt or anyone else will have a harder time getting to my data from them than the CCP will any chinese company.
> for some reason I think the us govt or anyone else will have a harder time getting to my data
US companies are required by law to hand over your data if given a warrant by USG. They don't need a warrant if they have a subpoena for less invasive data, or a FISA request. They can also ask without any justification, and see if the company will cough it up anyway (they often do). Any AI company with government contracts will want to give up data quicker so as not to threaten deals worth hundreds of millions.
> but for some reason I think the us govt or anyone else will have a harder time getting to my data from them than the CCP will any chinese company.
US tech companies voluntarily give their data to the US government. Don't you remember PRISM? You think they stopped doing that?
> Internal NSA presentation slides included in the various media disclosures show that the NSA could unilaterally access data and perform "extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information" with examples including email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP chats (such as Skype), file transfers, and social networking details.[2] Snowden summarized that "in general, the reality is this: if an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc. analyst has access to query raw SIGINT [signals intelligence] databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want."[13]
>I think the us govt or anyone else will have a harder time getting to my data than the CCP will any chinese company.
Why? You dont think that 5 eyes cyber peeps use every advantage they can get? And on the way out leave a dusting of evidence pointing at the russkies or chinese?
Why would two companies burning 100s of billions of dollars and are not profitable be safe keepers of your data when there is a huge market for all of that in the us and the us has really weak protections for those things so the companies can sell it to defense agencies?
Thing is, either way your data is getting hoovered up. If not today then eventually. It's just a matter of where. If you work in an industry where nation states might want to do you irreparable harm then yea don't let your data leave the country.
You know that protection racket where the mobster came to my corner store and says if I don't pay him he will come later and rough me up? This is a worse deal than that.
Maybe ai companies should have invested any of those billions of dollars into safe and equitable ways of rolling out their new surveillance machines. Oh right that was never the point and this only serves to further that. Got it.
I think they'd be OK w/o the surveillance machine part of it, but they have never seemed to care about anything besides advancement of the tech or its side projects.
I can imagine a world where they were fighting for displaced workers, for Altman/Elon-suggested UBI/universal "high" income plans, and where they'd compensated those in the training set, and cut deals with publishers & content creators instead of scraping anything they could get their hands on. Would they be unpopular?
Google is interested in, like other tech companies, identifying users by tying them to their phones. Other ai defense companies are trying to get photos and IDs. This is just another take on the same subversive activity.
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