Western AI Firms Are Worried About ‘Censorship’ In China’s AI Models

• Western AI companies have been sharing concerns surrounding the censorship of AI models made in China.
• Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue said China’s AI could cause problems for the West if it grows too big.
• AI models in China have been gaining popularity as their capabilities continue to grow.

As China’s open-source AI models continue to grow in prevalence and catch up to their Western counterparts, some leading AI firms have shared concerns over censorship.

By focusing on open-source development, companies such as Alibaba and Moonshot AI have made rapid advances in the AI space.

Censorship and Culture

In September, Clement Delaunge, the CEO of U.S. AI startup HuggingFace, warned that the growth of Chinese models could have far-reaching consequences for the Western world.

“If you create a chatbot and ask it a question about Tiananmen, well, it’s not going to respond to you the same way as if it was a system developed in France or the U.S.,” Delaunge told French podcast Génération Do It Yourself.

The CEO said that if China becomes the strongest on AI, it will be capable of “spreading certain cultural aspects that perhaps the Western world wouldn’t want to see spread.”

HuggingFace, the leading platform for AI models, features hundreds of LLMs from Chinese AI companies.

According to a report from TechCrunch, China-based DeepSeek, which gained popularity for its extensive reasoning capabilities, was found to censor topics historically sensitive to the Chinese government.

Delaunge previously stated that China was getting close to catching up with AI in the West due to its embrace of open source.

Other leading AI companies have spoken out against Chinese AI models, too. OpenAI developer Steven Heidel posted a meme on X relating to China’s AI censorship of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

In 2023, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared concerns about “authoritarian regimes” developing competing AI technology.

“We do worry a lot about authoritarian governments developing [AI models],” Altman told ABC News .

Popularity Is Increasing for China’s AI Models

China’s AI models have been getting an increasing spotlight recently as their capabilities continue to grow.

Chinese models have shown themselves to excel in bilingual benchmarks, which has helped to expand their global appeal.

The country’s ability to rapidly iterate on open-source Western frameworks has also contributed to this progress.

Alibaba Cloud said its new set of AI models, QwQ, allegedly managed to outperform OpenAI’s o1 in some benchmark tests.

According to the tech company, the AI models did better in two maths tests while matching o1 in problem-solving and coding.