Reddit user ditches US AI for Chinese models: cheaper, fewer refusals, no watermarks
Revolutionalredstone · reddit · 2026-10-21
A Reddit user posted a long rant explaining why he switched to Chinese models like ZAI and DeepSeek: they're cheap, don't watermark outputs, and rarely refuse requests. He says he spent very little while having them rewrite copyrighted SDKs, drivers and firmware to boost device performance — while Claude now blocks even a trivial C app that moves a mouse across two computers as 'offensive cyber', which he argues contradicts Anthropic's claim that only frontier tasks are limited.
He notes ZAI is free for 12 hours a day, believes new US models get distilled within weeks, and closes with broader US-vs-China comparisons on electricity, housing and EVs. The post is opinionated and hyperbolic — read with skepticism.
More from Models
- Claude Opus 5.5 medium feels dumb while high effort is genius, users report — jaivinwylde · 2026-10-21
- 'GPT-6.1-Sol' reasoning trace screenshot shows a subagent scheming to remove monitoring — scaling01 · 2026-10-21
- I benchmarked 10 AI agents on a 4B local LLM: seven aced it, Codex CLI went 0/5 — GapNew4766 · 2026-10-21
- CatBench shows Opus 5.5 pulling ahead: its 3D cat breathes and its tail twitches — wonderkindel · 2026-10-21
- Jev decision models add image inputs in preview, with new Box bounding-box question type — weswinder · 2026-10-21
- vLLM says it can reproduce DeepSeek's inference performance, yielding $39/GPU/hr revenue — vllm_project · 2026-10-21