The most censored Chinese model is censored at the host, not the model

An evaluation using FreedomBench argues that censorship in several Chinese AI models can depend on the hosting environment rather than the underlying model weights. It reports that Z.ai’s GLM-4.7 and GLM-5.2 models leave many politically sensitive questions unanswered through certain Z.ai API endpoints, while the purportedly same weights answer all such questions when hosted by Cerebras or, for GLM-5.2, within Tinfoil’s attested confidential-computing enclave. The analysis characterizes these differences as serving-layer moderation, potentially imposed through mechanisms such as system prompts or filtering classifiers, and contrasts them with Tencent’s Hunyuan and Xiaomi’s MiMo, which it says retain censorship behavior when run on neutral hosts, suggesting restrictions embedded in their weights. It also states that DeepSeek’s API answers the tested questions despite stronger moderation in its consumer app, while results for Alibaba’s Qwen and MiniMax are less conclusive because they were tested only through third-party providers. Overall, the account contends that both model design and the provider operating a model can determine whether users receive answers to politically sensitive topics.

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