Joe Rogan Experience #2548 - Brian Simpson · Aired Sep 1, 2026
Claim summary · not a verbatim quotation
China is the only country with large language models that have all the guardrails removed.
The finding
What the evidence shows
This isn't accurate. China's own leading model, DeepSeek, still has political censorship baked into its training and refuses to discuss topics like Tiananmen Square even when run locally, while another Chinese model, Kimi, actually matched Western models on censorship tests. Meanwhile, developers in the United States have long published openly uncensored models, like the Dolphin models built on Mistral, that explicitly strip out refusal behavior, so China is nowhere near the only country with unrestricted language models.
Read the supporting source · techcrunch.com ↗Quick answer & review status
Quick answer
Is it true that China is the only country with large language models that have all the guardrails removed?
No, not as stated. This isn't accurate. China's own leading model, DeepSeek, still has political censorship baked into its training and refuses to discuss topics like Tiananmen Square even when run locally, while another Chinese model, Kimi, actually matched Western models on censorship tests. It was said on Joe Rogan Experience #2548 - Brian Simpson, aired Sep 1, 2026, at 1:37:53. We haven't independently confirmed who said it. The supporting source is techcrunch.com, linked below.
The context belongs here.
No separately verified on-air correction is recorded for this check. That is not a claim that nobody corrected it.
- Attribution
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- Editorial context review
- Not recorded; generated finding
- Coverage
- One selected claim from the episode
Revisions to this check
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