All this data is accessible to national security agencies; this is true in every country in the world.

China has more integration between intelligence and industry than many western countries, and it does present a higher risk of unwanted “tech transfer” to industry than running on oracle or Google or ms or Amazon does in the US.

DHS has long staffed full time agents in California to deal with foreign IP exfiltration - using qwen is like fast/easy mode for IP exfiltration: why make anyone get a job in your palo alto office when you can just send it to them in Hanzhou?

Upshot - If you have something proprietary you’re working on I would generally advise not to just direct send it to Alibaba.

> Unless you're thinking Alibaba is going to ship chat logs to some government ministry

This made me think of a Seinfeld episode: "I didn't know it was possible not to know that."

>Unless you're thinking Alibaba is going to ship chat logs to some government ministry that will then dole out proprietary information to new competitors (which doesn't seem logistically feasible)

That's exactly the fear, and why would it not be logistically feasible? The threat is definitely a bit overhyped, but China has a longstanding track record of aggressive corporate espionage.

… building and selling a product to US companies that sends company-internal data to Chinese AI providers is not a particularly good way to get people to buy it.

Even if they weren’t individually worried about their proprietary data being shared with Chinese domestic competitors or with government… their audit / security programs likely wouldn’t allow it for a _huge_ range of types of data.

Because my CEO thinks China scary big hacker guys over there

[dead]