I'm not seeing a problem here; don't all companies have this goal?
Economic dumping is a specific scenario where one country tries to flood another country with cheap products in a way that usually has some government involvement subsidizing or incentivizing it. Countries are careful to hide these incentives or subsidies when possible because it's an invitation to trade wars. For China specifically, the state takes ownership positions in companies and has no problem forcing companies in the direction they want.
Gmail, and every other free service would like a word. Net tangential profit invalidates your point. They can loss lead LLM's forever if they are getting other economic benefit from the practice
When West does same, it is capitalism for the prosperity of everyone, healthy competition
In any case I find the dumping argument stupid: they are giving both the model weights away and publishing in the open their results and how they got there.
Isn't that just how competition works? Codex and Claude are both widely speculated to be sold at a loss (at least compared to API pricing), so why isn't their tactic also considered dumping? OpenAI and Anthropic aren't stealing IP and subsidizing model inference because they love freedom either. They're doing it to undermine industry competitors and attract people to their brands.
The US government deliberately chased a strategy of denying China access to powerful Nvidia hardware. Shipping efficient and cheap LLMs is their only option, just like Jensen Huang warned would happen. And now that China's smaller models are reaching the frontier, everyone cries foul.
It's more likely that the API prices are highly profitable. I could see the subscription plans losing them money for some power users who actually use 100% every week, but given my past experience with subscription products I would estimate that their average utilization is far, far lower than in those comparisons where people take the tokens produced by exhausting the plan 100% and then compare to hypothetical API pricing.
As for economic dumping: The crucial difference is that there's usually some geopolitical influence happening, like government subsidies, incentives, or the government simply owning the companies directly and weaponizing their output even if the company runs at a loss.
But we hear this "dumping" argument quite often for seemingly arbitrary purposes. Is it "dumping" to sell cheap STM-32 clones when Arm LTD. won't let you buy a license? Is it "dumping" to sell $20,000 EVs to a nation that can barely build $30,000 EVs with federal and state subsidies? In many respects, China's cheap stuff is just better-suited to the global economy than America's high-margin products. If both countries are leveraging federal protectionism to promote and develop their products, it doesn't feel like State Owned Enterprises are on unfair footing compared to SpaceX or OpenAI.