> increase the pressure to use cheaper / free models
Not necessarily. Many factors go into what models are available at enterprise level. If you look around, not many companies (everywhere around the world) use DeepSeek models even though they are significantly cheaper.
I think part of this is due to the fact that the closest competition cheap but comparable intelligence models are all mostly Chinese models.
Think what you want but even when hosted in the US, at the enterprise level going all in on that would be a legal and/or political death sentence.
We need better open source/cheap but high intelligence western models that are proven to work well in agent if tooling and have strong legal agreements for enterprise to even consider it.