A growing number of startups are editing powerful Chinese open-weight models for Western businesses that are concerned about censorship and security.

The concept of machine unlearning — or removing data from an artificial intelligence system after it has been trained — was largely an academic pursuit when Ben Luria, an Israeli entrepreneur, co-founded his startup. Then, China’s DeepSeek launched its first open-weight large language model last year, and Luria immediately saw the business potential of realigning it to Western values.

A slew of Chinese open-weight models from DeepSeek, Moonshot, Z.AI, AlibabaiAlibabaAlibaba, founded in 1999 by Chinese entrepreneur Jack Ma, is one of the most prominent global e-commerce companies that operates platforms like AliExpress, Taobao, and Tmall.READ MORE, and TencentiTencentBest known for its super-app WeChat, Tencent is a Chinese technology conglomerate and a major player in the video gaming industry.READ MORE have won over users — including American businesses and startups — with their lower costs, strong capabilities, and customization options. Others fear the models are too aligned with the Chinese Communist Party, and that they are not as safe as closed systems.

“We’re not making the model anti-Chinese. We are bringing it up to speed on safety and to the standard of mainstream Western AI.”

“What we’re trying to do is find a way to de-risk the adoption of open-weight models,” Luria, co-founder and chief executive of AI safety startup Hirundo, told Rest of World . “What we do is like neurosurgery, an intervention that’s surgical and very specific.

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