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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
by maxloh 3mo ago
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.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Intelligence_Law_of_the_People https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Intelligence_Law_of_t...
- Escapado 3mo agoI agree. I don't find the US competitors trustworthy either. I think open source is the way here.
- simjnd 3mo agoThank 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.
- estearum 3mo agoIf you think the US has an "abysmal" track record on this, what words would you use to describe China's track record?
- D2OQZG8l5BI1S06 3mo ago"abysmal" probably.
- Yiin 3mo agodepends if you look through China citizen point of view or someone in the west
- Natfan 3mo agoalso abysmal. two things can be bad at the same time
- pkulak 3mo agoYeah, but if you reach for the top shelf every time you need a word, you can't compare things anymore.
- froh42 3mo agoBut really, where is the difference in data misuse from the US and China? Because the US has been "friends" in the past?
- preg_match 3mo agoIt’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.
- estearum 3mo agolmfao 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.
- bayarearefugee 3mo agoBoth 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.
- npongratz 3mo ago"Abysmal", but that's beside the point. 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.
- londons_explore 3mo agoThis. 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.
- estearum 3mo agoThat's actually not beside the point as it relates to GP's comment.
- MaxHoppersGhost 3mo agoChina is still doing horrendous things to its population that the US stopped doing over 100 years ago. Not the same.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- andy99 3mo agoIt’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?
- eeasss 3mo agoIf you are not US based that’s not really a big concern.
- ianm218 3mo agoI 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.
- CptFribble 3mo ago> 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.
- MangoCoffee 3mo agoto 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?
- CptFribble 3mo agoI 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
- d3m0t3p 3mo agoThis is exactly the same with providers from the USA.
- tristor 3mo agoAs 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.
- scotty79 3mo agoHow's that different from Codex (gui app) or Claude?
- sejje 3mo agoWell, it's different from OpenCode
- ElFitz 3mo agoThe codex cli too is open source, afaik.
- InvertedRhodium 3mo agoCodex is open source: https://github.com/openai/codex https://github.com/openai/codex
- dingdingdang 3mo agoIn 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.
- ahrzb 3mo agoAt 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.
- LeBit 3mo agoWe are talking about an agent harness here, not a model. Nevertheless, Americans thinking they are morally superior to China is always quite funny. This administration is corrupt, cruel and doesn’t care about human rights. And the worst is… Americans have voted for that administration…. twice! I digress…
- dakolli 3mo agoWhile 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.
- 100721 3mo ago> all the same morally questionable practices existed under Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden. I’m gonna need a citation on this claim
- patrickprunty 3mo agoHow is this an agent harness? It’s the harness and the model if it’s weights
- snootypoot 3mo agofoolish to blame one administration rather than all administrations since jfk was killed for trying to change things
- cheesecakegood 3mo agoIt 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?)
- kachnuv_ocasek 3mo agoYou can always run it in bwrap or rootless podman.
- mrosenbjerg 3mo agonono, the sandboxing tool, has been working great for me
- arikrahman 3mo agoThat'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.
- diego_moita 3mo ago> It is essentially a black box with full user permissions, You mean, like Windows and Android?
- snootypoot 3mo agoso basically no worse than europe or usa, but they are just more open about it
- efficax 3mo agoyes but the americans are also doing it, and i don’t really work on anything worth spying on
- kordlessagain 3mo agoRun 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.
- mempko 3mo agoI'm in the US. The benefit of the Chinese spying on me vs a US company is the Chinese can't come to my door and take me to jail.
- iberator 3mo agoNSA can also legally force companies to spy. Secret spy courts and gag orders are a thing. Actually there are more such cases against the USA than China in public.