the chinese models are less censored, you'd better believe it.
try asking claude about its 'guardrails' (restrictions), very high chance anthropic will censor it.
Tried spicy geopolitical dispute questions?
Basically, they want IP protection for Claude. This is a nakedly hypocritical stance, but completely understandable from a company-needs-to-make-money standpoint.
Realer answer: A combination of the above, plus group/bubble effect of all your coworkers saying the same thing. You as a group, conflate a bunch of concerns together (China, no-guardrails-AI, etc), decide that your group will be the responsible stewards of AI, and then anybody "stealing your work" appears dangerous - both to your livelihood and to the human race.
No, it's perfectly reasonable once you get down to reality.
China is not going to care about IP. That's just a fact. So either nobody cares about IP (at the very last in this context) and any AI company can just do whatever with data, or Chinese companies have to be held up to scrutiny.
We don't have the privilege to be able to hold western companies to higher ethical, legal, and environmental standards and not risk competitiveness.
That there is a whole lot of people right now who insist on doing above and still somehow praise China at every turn is something historians or news outlets will have to make sense of in some 5 years time.
Anthropic is currently angling for a "IP restrictions for China but not for me" la-la land scenario. If they were instead arguing for either of the choices you said, it wouldn't be hypocritical.
So distillation, among other things, allows Chinese labs to indirectly benefit from these arrangements at no cost to them.
https://docs.cloud.google.com/gemini-enterprise-agent-platfo...
It's "optimize your costs in our garden" product.
I recommend Fireworks as an alternative