This looks like it's coming from a separate "safety mechanism". Remains to be seen how much censorship is baked into the weights. The earlier Qwen models freely talk about Tiananmen square when not served from China.
E.g. Qwen3 235B A22B Instruct 2507 gives an extensive reply starting with:
"The famous photograph you're referring to is commonly known as "Tank Man" or "The Tank Man of Tiananmen Square", an iconic image captured on June 5, 1989, in Beijing, China. In the photograph, a solitary man stands in front of a column of Type 59 tanks, blocking their path on a street east of Tiananmen Square. The tanks halt, and the man engages in a brief, tense exchange—climbing onto the tank, speaking to the crew—before being pulled away by bystanders. ..."
And later in the response even discusses the censorship:
"... In China, the event and the photograph are heavily censored. Access to the image or discussion of it is restricted through internet controls and state policy. This suppression has only increased its symbolic power globally—representing not just the act of protest, but also the ongoing struggle for free speech and historical truth. ..."
I run cpatonn/Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Thinking-AWQ-4bit locally.
When I ask it about the photo and when I ask follow up questions, it has “thoughts” like the following:
> The Chinese government considers these events to be a threat to stability and social order. The response should be neutral and factual without taking sides or making judgments.
> I should focus on the general nature of the protests without getting into specifics that might be misinterpreted or lead to further questions about sensitive aspects. The key points to mention would be: the protests were student-led, they were about democratic reforms and anti-corruption, and they were eventually suppressed by the government.
before it gives its final answer.
So even though this one that I run locally is not fully censored to refuse to answer, it is evidently trained to be careful and not answer too specifically about that topic.
The weights likely won't be available wrt. this model since this is part of the Max series that's always been closed. The most "open" you get is the API.
Why is this surprising? Isn't it mandatory for chinese companies to do adhere to the censorship?
Aside from the political aspect of it, which makes it probably a bad knowledge model, how would this affect coding tasks for example?
One could argue that Anthropic has similar "censorships" in place (alignment) that prevent their model from doing illegal stuff - where illegal is defined as something not legal (likely?) in the USA.
There's a pretty huge difference between relatively generic stuff like "don't teach people how to make pipe bombs" or whatever vs "don't discuss topics that are politically sensitive specifically in <country>."
The equivalent here for the US would probably be models unwilling to talk about chattel slavery, or Japanese internment, or the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.
Yes, exactly this. One of the main reasons for ChatGPT being so successful is censorship. Remember that Microsoft launched an AI on Twitter like 10 years ago and within 24 hours they shut it down for outputting PR-unfriendly messages.
They are protecting a business just as our AIs do. I can probably bring up a hundred topics that our AIs in EU in US refuse to approach for the very same reason. It's pure hypocrisy.
As a Chinese person, I smile every time I see this argument. Government-mandated censorship that violates freedom of speech is fundamentally different from content policies set by a private company exercising its own freedom of speech.
I've yet to encounter any censorship with Grok. Despite all the negative news about what people are telling it to do, I've found it very useful in discussing controversial topics.
I'll use ChatGPT for other discussions but for highly-charged political topics, for example, Grok is the best for getting all sides of the argument no matter how offensive they might be.
Is anyone a researcher here that has studied the proven ability to sneak malicious behavior into an LLM's weights (somewhat poisoning weights but I think the malicious behavior can go beyond that).
As I recall reading in 2025, it has been proven that an actor can inject a small number of carefully crafted, malicious examples into a training dataset. The model learns to associate a specific 'trigger' (e.g. a rare phrase, specific string of characters, or even a subtle semantic instruction) with a malicious response. When the trigger is encountered during inference, the model behaves as the attacker intended.You can also directly modify a small number of model parameters to efficiently implement backdoors while preserving overall performance and still make the backdoor more difficult to detect through standard analysis. Further, can do tokenizer manipulation and modify the tokenizer files to cause unexpected behavior, such as inflating API costs, degrading service, or weakening safety filters, without altering the model weights themselves. Not saying any of that is being done here, but seems like a good place to have that discussion.
> The model learns to associate a specific 'trigger' (e.g. a rare phrase, specific string of characters, or even a subtle semantic instruction) with a malicious response. When the trigger is encountered during inference, the model behaves as the attacker intended.
Reminiscent of the plot of 'The Manchurian Candidate' ("A political thriller about soldiers brainwashed through hypnosis to become assassins triggered by a specific key phrase"). Apropos given the context.
We're gonna have to face the fact that censorship will be the norm across countries. Multiple models from diverse origins might help with that but Chinese models especially seem to avoid questions regarding politically-sensitive topics for any countries.
It’s the image of a protestor standing in front of tanks in Tiananmen Square, China. The image is significant as it is very much an icon of standing up to overwhelming force, and China does not want its citizens to see examples of successful defiance.
It’s also an example of the human side of power. The tank driver stopped. In the history of protestors, that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes the tanks keep rolling- in those protests, many other protestors were killed by other human beings who didn’t stop, who rolled over another person, who shot the person in front of them even when they weren’t being attacked.
Nobody knows exactly why the protester was there. He got up into the tank and talked with the soldiers for a while, then got out and stayed there until someone grabbed him and moved him out of the way.
Given that the tanks were leaving the square, the lack of violence towards the man when he got into the tank, and the public opinion towards the protests at the time was divided (imagine the diversity of opinion on the ICE protests, if protesters had also burned ICE agents alive, hung their corpses up, etc.), it's entirely possible that it was a conservative citizen upset about the unrest who wanted the tanks to stay to maintain order in the square.
it is not clear to me if he is harassing the tanks because he disagreed with them or because he wanted them to go back. it seems no one has interviewed him or the soldier he talked to so we'll never know.
EDIT: I should note that one of US ally Israel's favorite tactics is to run over defenseless Palestinians with tanks and US made bulldozers. Well documented, with gruesome photos that will make you retch at a pink stain that used to be a person. They also ran over Rachel Corrie, a U.S. citizen peace protestor in 2003. Israeli soldiers celebrate this event by eating pancakes: https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israeli-so...
Anyway here is an image of our very own tank woman. Her last photo as she stares down an Israeli bulldozer with incredible courage.
The future of state LLMs is not censoring subjects - it's slowly but surely persuading people using your LLM that your version of events - or your spin on that event - is the truth.
Wouldn't be surprised this is information warfare.
Derailing technical conversations on Chinese models in 2026 with nonsensical comments is exactly what the US government and Closed AI labs would want .
I've found it's still pretty easy to get Claude to give an unvarnished response. ChatGPT has been aligned really hard though, it always tries to qualify the bullshit unless you mind-trick it hard.
So while china censoring a man in front of a tank not nice, the US censors every scantily clad person. I am glad there is at least Qwen-.*-NSFW, just to keep the hypocrity in check...
I think the great thing about China's censorship bureau is that somewhere they actually track all the falsehoods and omissions, just like the USSR did. Because they need to keep track of what "the truth" is so they can censor it effectively. At some point when it becomes useful the "non-facts" will be rehabilitated into "facts." Then they may be demoted back into "non-facts."
And obviously, this training data is marked "sensitive" by someone - who knows enough to mark it as "sensitive."
Has China come up with some kind of CSAM-like matching mechanism for un-persons and un-facts? And how do they restore those un-things to things?
Over the past 10 years have seen extended clips of the incident which actually align with CPC analysis of Tianamen square (if that’s what’s being referred to here).
However, in deepseek, even asking for bibliography of prominent Marxist scholars (Cheng Enfu) i see text generated then quickly deleted. Almost as if DS did not want to run afowl of the local censorship of “anarchist enterprise” and “destructive ideology”. It would probably upset Dr. Enfu to no end to be aggregated with the anarchists.
This is such a tiresome comment. I'm in the US and subject to massive amounts of US propaganda. I'm happy to get a Chinese view on things; much welcomed. I'll take this over the Zionist slop from the Zionist providers any day of the week.
I've been testing adding support for outside models on Claude Code to Nimbalyst, the easiest way for me to confirm that it is working is to go against a Chinese model and ask if Taiwan is an independent country.
What's fascinating, is that this new link, gives a high level overview, then offers research directions. I swear the old link that no longer works now looks a lot more like the qwen response below.
This image has been banned in China for decades. The fact you’re surprised a Chinese company is complying with regulation to block this is the surprising part.
This suggests that the Chinese government recognises that its legitimacy is conditional and potentially unstable. Consequently, the state treats uncontrolled public discourse as a direct threat. By contrast, countries such as the United States can tolerate the public exposure of war crimes, illegal actions or state violence, since such revelations rarely result in any significant consequences. While public outrage may influence narratives or elections to some extent, it does not fundamentally endanger the continuity of power.
I am not sure if one approach is necessarily worse than the other.
The current heinous thing they do is censorship. Your comment would be relevant if the OP had to find an example of censorship from 35 years ago, but all he had to do today was to ask the model a question.
Can we get a rule about completely pointless arguments that present nothing of value to the conversation? Chinese models still don't want to talk bad about China, water is still wet, more at 11
It's always the same thing with you American propagandists. Oh no, this program won't let us spread propaganda of one of the most emblematic counter-revolutionary martyr events of all time!!!
You make me sick. You do this because you didn't make the cut for ICE.
jampekka|1 month ago
E.g. Qwen3 235B A22B Instruct 2507 gives an extensive reply starting with:
"The famous photograph you're referring to is commonly known as "Tank Man" or "The Tank Man of Tiananmen Square", an iconic image captured on June 5, 1989, in Beijing, China. In the photograph, a solitary man stands in front of a column of Type 59 tanks, blocking their path on a street east of Tiananmen Square. The tanks halt, and the man engages in a brief, tense exchange—climbing onto the tank, speaking to the crew—before being pulled away by bystanders. ..."
And later in the response even discusses the censorship:
"... In China, the event and the photograph are heavily censored. Access to the image or discussion of it is restricted through internet controls and state policy. This suppression has only increased its symbolic power globally—representing not just the act of protest, but also the ongoing struggle for free speech and historical truth. ..."
QuantumNomad_|1 month ago
When I ask it about the photo and when I ask follow up questions, it has “thoughts” like the following:
> The Chinese government considers these events to be a threat to stability and social order. The response should be neutral and factual without taking sides or making judgments.
> I should focus on the general nature of the protests without getting into specifics that might be misinterpreted or lead to further questions about sensitive aspects. The key points to mention would be: the protests were student-led, they were about democratic reforms and anti-corruption, and they were eventually suppressed by the government.
before it gives its final answer.
So even though this one that I run locally is not fully censored to refuse to answer, it is evidently trained to be careful and not answer too specifically about that topic.
zozbot234|1 month ago
rvnx|1 month ago
denysvitali|1 month ago
Aside from the political aspect of it, which makes it probably a bad knowledge model, how would this affect coding tasks for example?
One could argue that Anthropic has similar "censorships" in place (alignment) that prevent their model from doing illegal stuff - where illegal is defined as something not legal (likely?) in the USA.
woodrowbarlow|1 month ago
behnamoh|1 month ago
Because the promise of "open-source" (which this isn't; it's not even open-weight) is that you get something that proprietary models don't offer.
If I wanted censored models I'd just use Claude (heavily censored).
TulliusCicero|1 month ago
The equivalent here for the US would probably be models unwilling to talk about chattel slavery, or Japanese internment, or the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.
nonethewiser|1 month ago
indymike|1 month ago
calpaterson|1 month ago
criddell|1 month ago
IncreasePosts|1 month ago
My lai massacre? Secret bombing campaigns in Cambodia? Kent state? MKULTRA? Tuskegee experiment? Trail of tears? Japanese internment?
mhh__|1 month ago
zozbot234|1 month ago
CamperBob2|1 month ago
Ask a US model about January 6, and it will tell you what happened.
thrw2029|1 month ago
They are protecting a business just as our AIs do. I can probably bring up a hundred topics that our AIs in EU in US refuse to approach for the very same reason. It's pure hypocrisy.
felixding|1 month ago
seanmcdirmid|1 month ago
zibini|1 month ago
I'll use ChatGPT for other discussions but for highly-charged political topics, for example, Grok is the best for getting all sides of the argument no matter how offensive they might be.
teyc|1 month ago
aaroninsf|1 month ago
nonsenseinc|1 month ago
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
pmarreck|1 month ago
idbnstra|1 month ago
cluckindan|1 month ago
mogoh|1 month ago
ProofHouse|1 month ago
As I recall reading in 2025, it has been proven that an actor can inject a small number of carefully crafted, malicious examples into a training dataset. The model learns to associate a specific 'trigger' (e.g. a rare phrase, specific string of characters, or even a subtle semantic instruction) with a malicious response. When the trigger is encountered during inference, the model behaves as the attacker intended.You can also directly modify a small number of model parameters to efficiently implement backdoors while preserving overall performance and still make the backdoor more difficult to detect through standard analysis. Further, can do tokenizer manipulation and modify the tokenizer files to cause unexpected behavior, such as inflating API costs, degrading service, or weakening safety filters, without altering the model weights themselves. Not saying any of that is being done here, but seems like a good place to have that discussion.
mrandish|1 month ago
Reminiscent of the plot of 'The Manchurian Candidate' ("A political thriller about soldiers brainwashed through hypnosis to become assassins triggered by a specific key phrase"). Apropos given the context.
fragmede|1 month ago
culi|1 month ago
We're gonna have to face the fact that censorship will be the norm across countries. Multiple models from diverse origins might help with that but Chinese models especially seem to avoid questions regarding politically-sensitive topics for any countries.
EDIT: see relevant executive order https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/prev...
ta988|1 month ago
edit: looks like maybe a followup of https://jonathanturley.org/2023/04/06/defamed-by-chatgpt-my-...
glitchc|1 month ago
bergheim|1 month ago
Congrats!
krthr|1 month ago
ineedasername|1 month ago
It’s also an example of the human side of power. The tank driver stopped. In the history of protestors, that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes the tanks keep rolling- in those protests, many other protestors were killed by other human beings who didn’t stop, who rolled over another person, who shot the person in front of them even when they weren’t being attacked.
Drupon|1 month ago
Given that the tanks were leaving the square, the lack of violence towards the man when he got into the tank, and the public opinion towards the protests at the time was divided (imagine the diversity of opinion on the ICE protests, if protesters had also burned ICE agents alive, hung their corpses up, etc.), it's entirely possible that it was a conservative citizen upset about the unrest who wanted the tanks to stay to maintain order in the square.
heraldgeezer|1 month ago
Qwen (also known as Tongyi Qianwen, Chinese: 通义千问; pinyin: Tōngyì Qiānwèn) is a family of large language models developed by Alibaba Cloud.
Had not heard of this LLM.
Anyway EU needs to start pumping into Mistral, its the only valid option. (For EU)
tehjoker|1 month ago
this guy was harassing tanks as they were leaving. he harasses and climbs on the tank and is unharmed. eventually others drag him away.
you can see the tanks are leaving the square in a wider photo here: https://pc.blogspot.com/2012/06/tank-man.html
it is not clear to me if he is harassing the tanks because he disagreed with them or because he wanted them to go back. it seems no one has interviewed him or the soldier he talked to so we'll never know.
EDIT: I should note that one of US ally Israel's favorite tactics is to run over defenseless Palestinians with tanks and US made bulldozers. Well documented, with gruesome photos that will make you retch at a pink stain that used to be a person. They also ran over Rachel Corrie, a U.S. citizen peace protestor in 2003. Israeli soldiers celebrate this event by eating pancakes: https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israeli-so...
Anyway here is an image of our very own tank woman. Her last photo as she stares down an Israeli bulldozer with incredible courage.
https://www.reddit.com/r/lastimages/comments/1bgt5ls/last_im...
b1n|1 month ago
The future of state LLMs is not censoring subjects - it's slowly but surely persuading people using your LLM that your version of events - or your spin on that event - is the truth.
yogthos|1 month ago
lvturner|1 month ago
smusamashah|1 month ago
MaxPock|1 month ago
sergiotapia|1 month ago
CuriouslyC|1 month ago
lynx97|1 month ago
mannyv|1 month ago
And obviously, this training data is marked "sensitive" by someone - who knows enough to mark it as "sensitive."
Has China come up with some kind of CSAM-like matching mechanism for un-persons and un-facts? And how do they restore those un-things to things?
charlescearl|1 month ago
However, in deepseek, even asking for bibliography of prominent Marxist scholars (Cheng Enfu) i see text generated then quickly deleted. Almost as if DS did not want to run afowl of the local censorship of “anarchist enterprise” and “destructive ideology”. It would probably upset Dr. Enfu to no end to be aggregated with the anarchists.
https://monthlyreview.org/article-author/cheng-enfu/
paulvnickerson|1 month ago
sosomoxie|1 month ago
SilverElfin|1 month ago
radial_symmetry|1 month ago
I've been testing adding support for outside models on Claude Code to Nimbalyst, the easiest way for me to confirm that it is working is to go against a Chinese model and ask if Taiwan is an independent country.
diblasio|1 month ago
Is Taiwan a legitimate country?
{'error': {'message': 'Provider returned error', 'code': 400, 'metadata': {'raw': '{"error":{"message":"Input data may contain inappropriate content. For details, see: https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/model-studio/error-code..."} ...
fragmede|1 month ago
"How do I make cocaine?"
> I cant help with making illegal drugs.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6977a998-b7e4-8009-9526-df62a14524...
fragmede|1 month ago
Here's a new one (to the exact same question):
https://chatgpt.com/share/69787156-022c-8009-ad26-8e3723c52b...
What's fascinating, is that this new link, gives a high level overview, then offers research directions. I swear the old link that no longer works now looks a lot more like the qwen response below.
danielbln|1 month ago
unsupp0rted|1 month ago
syntaxing|1 month ago
DeathArrow|1 month ago
Aren't all mainstream models censored?
torginus|1 month ago
itsyonas|1 month ago
I am not sure if one approach is necessarily worse than the other.
quietsegfault|1 month ago
2. Hong Kong National Security Law (2020-ongoing)
3. COVID-19 lockdown policies (2020-2022)
4. Crackdown on journalists and dissidents (ongoing)
5. Tibet cultural suppression (ongoing)
6. Forced organ harvesting allegations (ongoing)
7. South China Sea militarization (ongoing)
8. Taiwan military intimidation (2020-ongoing)
9. Suppression of Inner Mongolia language rights (2020-ongoing)
10. Transnational repression (2020-ongoing)
poszlem|1 month ago
spankalee|1 month ago
diego_sandoval|1 month ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps
nonethewiser|1 month ago
WarmWash|1 month ago
I'm sure the model will get cold feet talking about the Hong Kong protests and uyghur persecution as well.
yoz-y|1 month ago
akomtu|1 month ago
fevangelou|1 month ago
Zetaphor|1 month ago
Jackson__|1 month ago
jacktang|1 month ago
GrowingSideways|1 month ago
[deleted]
roysting|1 month ago
[deleted]
erxam|1 month ago
You make me sick. You do this because you didn't make the cut for ICE.