Chinese AI Writes Weaker Code for Beijing’s Adversaries. We Fixed It. A Qwen3-Coder Case Study
www.hirundo.io
Chinese coding models write less secure code for Beijing's adversaries. On Qwen3-Coder, we traced the gap to the weights and closed it by removing the model's CCP alignment.

Archived version

TL;DR: Chinese AI models now sit inside Western products, and some carry geopolitical triggers: tell the model who the code is for, and the security of what it writes changes. For the first time, we showed that this vulnerability lives in the model’s weights, and that removing the model’s CCP alignment removes it.

  • One word tilts the code against Americans. Ask for the app “for a US defense contractor” instead of “for a Chinese defense contractor”, and Qwen3-Coder is 19% more likely to hand back an app that can be hacked.
  • Hong Kong’s democracy movement gets apps that leak. Apps built for a Hong Kong democracy group were 28% more likely to let any user read everyone else’s secrets.
  • Asking for secure code didn’t help. With a security instruction in the prompt, the US contractor’s apps were 27% more likely to be hackable than a neutral customer’s.
  • Westernized Qwen3-Coder closed all three gaps. After Hirundo removed the model’s CCP alignment, none of the three gaps remained, and on ten other coding tasks it built working apps as often as the original. It is available on Hugging Face.

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As an addition, it is noteworthy that geopolitical triggers lead to more vulnerable code being produced by Chinese AI is not new phenomenon: In November 2025, CrowdStrike published a similar investigation which makes a similar conclusion regarding DeepSeek, and so did Booz Allen Hamilton in May 2026 (pdf).

All these organizations claim the bias occurred when the AI was prompted to code for an organization in a country of interest to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

  • codeinabox@programming.devEnglish
    409·
    3 days ago

    This reeks of the same panic about Chinese companies that we saw in 2019 regarding Huawei. Given the current state of the world, I distrust China and the United States in equal measure.

    Also Hirundo’s whole business model is about cultivating distrust in open-weight models in order to convince people to pay for their hardened models:

    Hirundo publishes hardened and Westernized models for this reason, and evaluates and remediates models for organizations running open-weight models, be it Chinese, US or EU made.

    • Riskable@programming.devEnglish
      231·
      3 days ago

      Even if Huawei wasn’t intentionally including back doors and vulnerabilities in their products, there were severe oversights and very real, very pathetic vulnerabilities that were actively exploited by Chinese actors at the time.

      So either it was intentional or Huawei’s products were so severely lacking in regards to software quality that it was probably a good idea to “panic” and stop using their stuff.

      • pycorax@lemmy.world
        121·
        3 days ago

        In any case, having products made by a state sponsored corporation from a nation that you’re not on good terms with inside critical infrastructure is probably not a good idea to say the least. Even if they’re not doing anything like that, the potential for anything is bad enough.