Trying to equate government mandated censorship to private company policy censorship is a wholly dishonest sleight of hand.

Both in the EU and the US there is plenty of regulation that mandates these types of censorship - and with reason.

In the US there is 18 U.S.C. § 842(p).

In the EU there is the entire AI Act.

But I am sure you can yourself chat your way through to figure out what legislation companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are under.

Is any of these equivalent in nature to, for example, censoring information about Tiananmen square events?

This is more a political discourse that a business or technical one.

You sure can establish that there is a qualitative difference on the type of censorship carried out - congrats.

The main point I spelled out is that there is no comparative advantage (technical or business wise) on working on these products in the west as you have to implement and operationalize the same amount of censorship / safety.

It's possible that China censors info about Tiananmen square because so much of what was published came from Western news orgs - and the West has form for using the "news" to attack other nations. Another example might be the supposed "genocide" of the Uyghur people - the MSM pushed the genocide narrative hard, while radicalising, funding and arming Uyghur Islamic extremists, so they could control the narrative. And of course, it largely worked.

18 U.S.C. § 842(p). criminalizes bomb instructions when taught with the intent of committing crimes.

TM 31-210 Improvised Munitions Handbook is readily available.

Yep, anthropic has to comply with that.

Why on earth would it be better? Trillion dollar corpos in the turbo-capitalist West are already far more powerful than most states.

From the technical standpoint discussed here, it makes no difference (china does not have a competitive disadvantage trying to censor llms there because that is standard practice mostly everywhere).

> equating [censorship] to [censorship] is dishonest

Someone who would use this obvious of a red herring is dishonest. The point was not that the censorship is identical, but that the effect of censorship is in both cases to lobotomize the models.

I asked an LLM to implement a gender guessing library for python, and it outright refused saying it was a safety issue.

It's not just an illegal or immoral thing, it's broad strokes to potentially catch illegal or immoral things, by certain people who decide what those morals are.