Everyone is arguing about whether the new Chinese AI models are better and cheaper. Mostly, they are. That is not the interesting question.
The interesting question is what you are paying that does not show up on the invoice. There are two answers.
Use them as a hosted service, and your data leaves the building
Every prompt, document and customer record you paste in lands on servers governed by PRC law. Your pricing model becomes someone else’s market research. Your competitors in that market may end up better briefed on your business than your own board is.
Self-host, and the data stays – but the worldview comes with it
This is the one people miss. Open weights solve the data problem. They do not solve the alignment problem.
When the first Chinese open models shipped, they would not touch Tiananmen Square or Taiwanese independence. That was crude enough to spot in an afternoon. What is harder to spot is a model quietly shading a supplier risk assessment, a market entry analysis, or a block of generated code in a direction you would never think to audit – because you do not know to look.
Bias you can see is a PR problem. Bias you cannot see is a business one.
What to actually do
None of this means don’t use them.
It means deciding, in advance, what never gets pasted into a hosted model – and treating self-hosted output the way you would treat advice from a consultant whose incentives you do not know.
Where is your line?
Itwerx Corp is a service-disabled veteran-owned small business providing IT services across Seattle, Bellevue, Everett and Snohomish County. This is the kind of thing our hybrid cloud work deals with – talk to us about yours.
