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I have to ask what's everyone's issue with the requests to China. We've had 25 years of American big tech basically capture all our data, and use that to make insane profits.
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This is a false equivalency. American providers don't answer to their government.
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When the White House told Anthropic to take Fable offline - they did it. They are all going to comply with FISA warrants that the public will never see.
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What? The US govt has in practice unlimited access to whatever that's hosted in the US, or even outside by a US company. It's called the CLOUD act.
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Of course they do. See Zuckerberg's episode on Joe Rogan.
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And that changes things how exactly? The problem is that American companies have been stealing our data for decades, not their ties to the government.
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Oh but they absolutely do. The difference was mainly that up to a few years ago, the American government (generally) didn't care to repress those with the "wrong" opinions. Whereas China was always quite adamant about it.
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Sure. Can you tell me why that means that it's ok for Chinese big tech to capture all our data?
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The government that is most likely to use your data against you is the government of the country you live in. If a foreign government wanted to use your data against you the easiest way for them to do it would ironically be to send it to your government.
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Makes sense in short term & for personal queries. A German or Norwegian model provider shouldn’t tattle on US Southerners seeking reproductive care.

Long-term & software engineering fronts: I hear occasional railing against “US hegemony”. Anyone concerned that if a new tech gives rise to a different country, they’ll become the source of ire instead? (This isn’t my field, at all.)

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My code is opensource, china already has it. For my professional work we have entreprise plans with OpenAI / Anthropic
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For an average European, why is it better than routing requests to the USA?
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Chime-in for an average non us citizen why is it better ?
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The argument has never been that it would be better (a domestic EU provider would obviously be better than either from a data handling perspective). But its not obviously worse
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Valid question. I have no 100% factual answers and neither does anyone else here.

So I go with feeling, and that feeling says that China is worse. The feeling is partially supported by the fact that China is softly backing Russia in its attack against the west.

Trump's USA is obviously completely horrible, but he is also in large part a product of Russian influence, which again is part of the larger block in which China resides.

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"The west" is a stupid idea America uses to force themselves and Israel into the same league as EU countries.

And China is not really supporting Russia, they make money off the war and want to keep it going as long as possible so both Russia and Ukraine become weak and more open to their influence. Is it evil? Absolutely, but you can't compare them to USA when Trump is actively doing regime change operations, deporting its own citizens and putting sanctions on the ICC.

Chinese communists want to stay in power at all costs but America wants to expand its power into the whole world. It's not the same level of danger at all.

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> want to keep it going as long as possible

note that the volume of EU and US support to Ukraine is obviously calibrated to the same goal.

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Yes I unfortunately trust those who are motivated by money more than ideology. Greed, while horrible and ugly, is at least very predictable. Messianic, or even utopian or pretty much any ideology, can lead to absolutely insane levels of destruction. You just don't know what true believers of any sort are willing to do.
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>And China is not really supporting Russia

Yes, yes they are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_and_the_Russo-Ukrainian_...

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To be fair, east and west are in relation to England, not the US.

Trump’s a smelly orange shit but the US at least pretends to have data privacy protections and we can’t legally compel companies to have back doors… yet. I think. It’s very hard to keep up with all the nonsense these days.

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> and we can’t legally compel companies to have back doors

In a post-Snowden world where the existence of PRISM is no longer a secret, I'm not sure how folks can keep stating this with a straight face

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Opencode also has a setting to not route to China, though this would probably just disable the models that do not have providiers in alternative locations.
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If you pay for a business plan on openrouter (I know, it’s not opencode, just another option), you can geo lock providers if China is a concern.
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Doesn’t that depend on the router service provider?
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