In the interest of transparency you should update your post with the model you fine tuned, it matters.
regardless of what i'm allowed to say, i will personally defend that actually its increasingly less important the qualities of the base model you choose as long as its "good enough", bc then the RL/posttrain qualities and data takes over from there and is the entire point of differentiation
I think the real reason is that it's a Chinese model (I mean, come on) and your parent company doesn't want any political blowback.
As if it doesn't cost tens of millions to pre-train a model. Not to mention the time it takes. Do you want them to stall progress for no good reason?
I doubt current models from China are trained to do smart spying / injecting sneaky tool calls. But based on my Deep Learning experience with the models both training and inference, it's definitely possible to train a model to do this in a very subtle and hard to detect way...
So your point is valid and I think they should specify the base model for security concerns, or conduct safety evaluations on it before passing it to sensitive customers