It's in their strategic interest to be perceived as the good guys in this because the US is aggressively limiting access, but the thing is more fundamental:

The rest of the world has been shown that access to commercial US models can be withdrawn with one stroke of a pen. Even to "foreigners that live in the US", aka crazy shit. Because: that literally happened. 

But for open weights models that can function fully disconnected from any infra or borders or pen stroke, China cannot do the same. That's why one ought to get a bunch of those nice 24TB USB desktop disks. And leech models like there is no tomorrow. Because who knows. But once you have it, no one can take the capability away from you anymore bar boots on the ground invasion. Good luck with that.

I'm no China shill at all. I don't trust them at all, nor any other overlord. The difference is: they cannot tell me what I can and cannot do with current capability. Even if they desire it. Sovereignty of the only kind that matters has been strengthened: my sovereignty.

I can't imagine China being truly more open than the US. maybe they think their social control over people is strong enough that they don't feel the need to control the models?

SimpleStacker

One of the most infuriating details of this story is how Hugging Face, faced with an accidental and aggressive attack from one of OpenAI’s models, were unable to then turn to OpenAI’s models to help them fend off the attack.

The frontier models we have access to are increasingly being constrained in how much they can help us protect our software, heavily influenced by the US government’s ongoing threat of export controls. Claude Fable 5 wouldn’t even

for me! It insisted on downgrading me to a less capable model.

Meanwhile open weight models from China such as GLM-5.2, Kimi 3 and the new Qwen 3.8 Max appear to have none of these restrictions—and any restrictions that do exist can likely be fine-tuned out of them by modifying the weights

These constraints are meant to make us safer. I think there’s a risk that they are having the opposite effect

Cofounder of Hugging Face hacked by OpenAI models says it is 'a wake-up call'

read this now it makes me wonder


[**The asymmetry is increasingly frustrating**](https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/22/openai-cyberattack/)

*One of the most infuriating details of this story is how Hugging Face, faced with an accidental and aggressive attack from one of OpenAI’s models, were unable to then turn to OpenAI’s models to help them fend off the attack.*

*The frontier models we have access to are increasingly being constrained in how much they can help us protect our software, heavily influenced by the US government’s ongoing threat of export controls. Claude Fable 5 wouldn’t even* [*proofread this article*](https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-patterns/prompts/#proofreader) *for me! It insisted on downgrading me to a less capable model.*

*Meanwhile open weight models from China such as GLM-5.2, Kimi 3 and the new Qwen 3.8 Max appear to have none of these restrictions—and any restrictions that do exist can likely be fine-tuned out of them by modifying the weights*

*These constraints are meant to make us safer. I think there’s a risk that they are having the opposite effect*.