The calculus is changing for non US, non Chinese users.

Hypothetically if the US continues to restrict their frontier models and adds a ban on Chinese/open models then it would to obliterate services like open router. American cloud companies would presumably be blocked from selling capacity to run banned models in this situation.

That causes a shortage of compute/gpu resources internationally and an oversupply of non-revenue generating hardware in the US.

If that happens then what percent of your salary is worth securing this compute worth? How much does the cost of a data centre chip change? It’s difficult to say.

Small businesses can easily buy them.

You’re talking $100k for entry level hw

20K won't buy you a rig for GPT 5.5

I already have

Why would they? Today you have datacenters in EU offering Chinese and European models from Deepseek v4 Pro and Mistral Medium down to some Qwen 3.6 35B for effectively peanuts compared to Anthropic.