No, in fact inference is far cheaper than most think, see analysis for serving Kimi K3.

If you mean OpenAI and Anthropic's investments into R&D, ok, perhaps.

However, they will not be able to increase prices unless what they are offering next is a significant enough improvement over the current SOTA, which might only be six months ahead of the Chinese models.

Not only is inference currently much cheaper than people seem to think, it is going to get much cheaper. NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin is going to drive costs down for current models considerably.