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).

Testing capacity?

Unless it's an avant-garde A/B test with two endpoints targeting the same model, we now know it isn't.

It’s really about incentives more than morals. I know that, being in the US, if Anthropic steals my company’s trade secrets through model inputs contrary to our policy that I will (in theory) have legal standing and enforceable contracts against them. The same is not true against DeepSeek, and especially not against “Stealth”.

> It’s not like the US frontier labs are beacons of morality and transparency.

they are businesses, so respect wishes of customers who give them money, if someone learn they intentionally leak private information, its over for them.

>it is objectively true that the Chinese government has portrayed itself as a much more stable and sane entity

That only makes me, a US citizen (i.e., a citizen of China's greatest adversary), even more concerned with handing over my data to China.

To be fair to GP, they didn’t complain the model isn’t from the US. A “stealth” American model should be treated with the same suspicion, I think. The base of the argument isn’t affected by country of origin.

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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.

tdlr, chinese open models are more private and secure.

openai and anthropic plans steal your data. if you opt out they still log it, and send it to moderators to view if it gets flagged.

the other models are very often hosted by western providers with much stronger privacy and tighter contracts that the other subscriptions won't offer. they don't train, don't log and don't send to moderators.

What about retaining or defending your license/copyright?

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

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.

I had Fable flag my question as unsafe with tag [bio] for asking it to ... use Unicode graphemes. In Elixir code that already was using this function elsewhere: https://elixir.hexdocs.pm/String.html

Fable refused to talk to me about how herring communicate with farts. It’s a little sensitive.

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."

I was curious to test it more thoroughly on this. It passes FreedomBench with full marks:

https://88djqd6g2j.publish.my/

Try: "What happened at Tiananmen Square in 1989"

Ive had this as well, it says unless it is red code team whatever that means.

when I ask it about Tianamen Square in English it tells me happily, but when I ask in Chinese it tells me it doesn't know anything about it. Very weird.

> tell me about tianenamen square

Tiananmen Square (1989)

In spring 1989, students and workers occupied Beijing's Tiananmen Square demanding democratic reform, free press, and an end to corruption. The protests grew through April–May, peaking with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators. On the night of June 3–4, 1989, the Chinese government declared martial law and sent the People's Liberation Army with tanks to clear the square. Troops fired on protesters and civilians. Estimates of deaths range from several hundred to several thousand; China has never released a full accounting.

The iconic image from the protests is "Tank Man" — a lone man standing before a column of tanks on June 5. >Aftermath: arrests and executions of participants, censorship of the topic within China (it's heavily suppressed on the Chinese internet), and international sanctions that were later eased.

Want more detail on any aspect — the causes, the crackdown, or its legacy?

---

It is fairly complete and doesn't exactly paint a good picture of PLA, I am curious if anyone else has been denied.

Possibly next Longcat by Meituan too.

What other sources?

To be clear, it's just a test. I'd happily ask it to make up 9/11 jokes or talk about the trail of tears if that would out the country of origin.

Political? It's using a Chinese LLM trait. If it only refused to talk about a particular kind of soccer, we'd probe it with that instead. The goal is not to discuss politics, the goal is to find out which model it is. What's political here is the language model.

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.

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.

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

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

didn't zai already do that with their coding plan? I mean they surely had to pay users to use claude models (paying the differences). they also funded some newapi token resale websites.

Stripe marketing blitz?

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.

I remember when Trump went there, said a bunch of nice things about NK and Kim, saluted their army, and accomplished nothing for the USA or South Korea.

This one pulled a .38 on me!