I don't understand this statement at all. The OpenAI API is a standard which works against any number of models hosted by a whole pile of providers and the open weight models from Chinese labs are available from providers that aren't on US soil and likely ones in the EU, or you could just pay the $$ and host vLLM on your own GPU. Many of them (K2.5 the Minimax, the GLM models, the Qwen 3.6 models) are about as capable as frontier US models from about 4 months ago or so.

Unless you're trying to run a frontier coding agent at Codex/Claude Code levels, that's not a hard blank to fill right now.

Fair point on open models + EU hosting, that's a much better option than I gave it credit for. I was thinking more about the "just plug in an API key and go" experience where OpenAI/Anthropic are still way ahead, but yeah if you're willing to do the work the gap is closing fast.