These price and speed optimization from Chinese providers, combined with the raising prices from American ones will change the game sooner than later. Many companies are finding issues with the AI bills already.

Chinese model is good enough and cheap.

i've a Github copilot yearly subscription. Microsoft recently changed their billing to based on token. i'm still getting billed per premium request but GPT 5.4 is now 6x compare to 1x before.

I'm kind of poor so I have been trying to use DeepSeek v4 Flash, GLM 5.1 etc. as much as possible recently instead of Claude or GPT.

I see bigger problem with model inconsistency. You never know whether Anthropic will route your request to a cheaper model for the price of Opus. So you can never estimate how much a task will cost, because you might have to restart several times and pay for each attempt. Then you have to prompt models to gauge whether they are real or impostors which also adds to token usage.

Another problem is that US models are all closed source, and if you're a large corporate you may not want your org to be held hostage by OpenAI / Anthropic.

I genuinely don't understand what moat these US model labs have. If they're saying recursive self improvement is just around the corner and Chinese labs are only slightly behind the leading US models, what moat does the US labs have? Are the US models going to recursively self improve better than the Chinese open source ones or something?

I might be completely wrong about this, but if I had money in OpenAI or Anthropic I'd be pulling it all right now. I think the chance of them going to near-zero over the next few years is very significant.

I wonder what are the economics driving these pricing decisions? Are the Chinese companies just subsidizing their models to a greater degree than the US, or is this an emergent property of energy policy between countries?