What competitive advantage does OpenAI/Anthropic has when companies like Qwen/Minimax/etc are open sourcing models that shows similar (yet below than OpenAI/Anthropic) benchmark results? Also, the token prices of these open source models are at a fraction of Anthropic's Opus 4.6[1] [1]: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/#pricing
For coding often quality at the margin is crucial even at a premium. It’s not the same as cranking out spam emails or HN posts at scale. This is why the marginal difference between your median engineer and your P99 engineer is comp is substantial, while the marginal comp difference between your median pick and packer vs your P99 pick and packer isn’t. I’d also say it keeps the frontier shops competitive while costing…
Also, have you considered that your trust in Anthropic and distrust in China may not be shared by many outside the US? There's a reason why Huawei is the largest supplier of 5G hardware globally.