The $20/month Claude Code plan has incredibly low rate limits. $20/month of DeepSeek usage buys you a lot. Even more so in hobby projects where usage is bursty, not nicely distributed over a work week

If that's a concern, an easy alternative is using companies like novita or fireworks.ai to run open source chinese models. They are incredibly price competitive, have strict data retention policies, and in general are quite fast. Also, you don't get used to a model and suddenly get rug pulled when the provider decide to upgrade.

Deepseek is much cheaper so that means you spend less on CCP than on Anthropic/OpenAI. Then there are third party providers as well.

It's a testament to how much American companies have been fucking over their own reputations that people would view them as not "better or worse" than an extension of the CCP.

A decade ago, just that kind of comparison would've been pretty unthinkable.

I mean, Deepseek is open model, it can be rehosted in the US by anyone, there’s no royalty to china

>...sending money to China...

Have you seen the trade deficit lately?

Why is Altman worse?

Dario is constantly fearmongering to generate press, gaslighting, and contradicting himself. Mythos is the most recent example of that. It was never too powerful to release, that was a lie to generate publicity and fear, and an excuse because they didn't have the compute to serve it. People were finding the same bugs and exploits using GPT5.4, GPT5.5, and lesser models. Now all of a sudden, they do have the compute, and now they're saying that Mythos is releasing in the coming weeks.

Anthropic is constantly caught up in ethical scandals too. They pump the web full of advertising bots. They steal peoples tokens, punish you for disabling telemetry, blacklist people they don't like. They had remote code execution vulns in their product for nearly a year and secretly buried that fact, no disclosures at all. Here are some of them https://clawd.rip

They're the least generous with open-source. The most closed off. The most likely to punish you for doing something they disagree with. Whenever OpenAI has issues they reset Codex's rate limits, they've done this every month that I can remember, and sometimes several weeks in a month. When's the last time Anthropic has done that for the many service issues they have had? Never. Not once.

Anthropic also never reply to peoples complaints or issues on GH issues, meanwhile the Codex team is very responsive and they actually care about customers user experience.

There's more, but you get the point. And yes, obviously not all of this is about Dario himself, but he drives the culture at the company.