OpenAI has since made its own coding tool, Codex, a company priority. But it’s playing catch up.
Not everyone agrees with this take. Some believe the oligopoly of AI in the Western hemisphere allows for companies to charge increasingly high prices for processing their prompts—Chinese models charging so little being proof of this. If this is the case, there may be room for drastic price changes while still being on solid financial ground.
Real enterprise deployments are moving to metered API pricing, and companies are burning credits far faster than flat fees ever suggested. Meanwhile, open-source inference providers (companies that provide compute power so AI models can process information) are scaling fast, with agentic tools being the catalyst for their growth. These platforms serve China’s leading AI models like DeepSeek, GLM, MiMo, Kimi or Minimax, which compete with Claude Opus on coding benchmarks, at a roughly one-thirteenth the price of the closed alternative.
The whole thesis breaks only if China goes closed-source, Shaughnessy noted, which would be bullish for the U.S. labs.
So far, most of China’s AI labs appear committed to the opposite approach.
