Its also a weird way to cede control of the market to the foreign model vendors, because I'm reasonably sure that DeepSeek et al aren't subsidising tokens to the same extent that the big 3's subscription models have been.
I think there's "sort of" a moat for non-Chinese vendors. As much as people distrust the US right now, I think deep down inside everyone knows that the second you let a Chinese provider do inference on your codebase they're gonna suck up every bit of it. But hey, cheap tokens, right?
So you'll probably never see government customers allow that and neither will a lot of commercial customers.
I think there's "sort of" a moat for non-Chinese vendors. As much as people distrust the US right now, I think deep down inside everyone knows that the second you let a Chinese provider do inference on your codebase they're gonna suck up every bit of it. But hey, cheap tokens, right?
So you'll probably never see government customers allow that and neither will a lot of commercial customers.