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1 / 4Western startups are selling Chinese open models with the censorship edited out×

The edit

Hirundo and Boston's Lazarus AI edit the weights of models from DeepSeek, Moonshot, Z.ai, Alibaba and Tencent to strip state-aligned content and reduce security risks, Rest of World reports.

Who runs it

Lazarus's ReAligned Qwen models run at about a dozen US companies.

The claim

Hirundo says its edits cut biased answers from 89.8% to 2.8% of 500 prompts on its own benchmark, which nobody has checked independently.

Why it exists

The market exists because Airbnb, Uber and Harvey have built on Chinese models and top Chinese systems trail the best US closed ones by about 3% on benchmarks. Washington barred civilian agencies from DeepSeek products in October.

Sources and the full story

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Western startups are selling Chinese open models with the censorship edited out

Hirundo and Boston's Lazarus AI edit the weights of models from DeepSeek, Moonshot, Z.ai, Alibaba and Tencent to strip state-aligned content and reduce security risks, Rest of World reports. Lazarus's ReAligned Qwen models run at about a dozen US companies. Hirundo says its edits cut biased answers from 89.8% to 2.8% of 500 prompts on its own benchmark, which nobody has checked independently. The market exists because Airbnb, Uber and Harvey have built on Chinese models and top Chinese systems trail the best US closed ones by about 3% on benchmarks. Washington barred civilian agencies from DeepSeek products in October. SourcesBC

Sources

• BWestern startups realigning Chinese AI models (Rest of World)restofworld.org
• CHirundo's Westernized Qwen release (Barchart via Webull, search excerpt)webull.com

This story ran in the Afternoon Brief of November 3rd 2026.