Absolutely nothing stops Microsoft/Amazon/Open Router( with partners) from hosting the Chinese models. As far as I can tell this is already the case.
This establishes a defacto price cap on what Anthropic and Open AI can charge. If you’re a heavy user blowing past 400$ a month self hosting becomes economical. A Mac Studio with 128GB of ram is about 6k.
Every day local tools are getting better, the OSX ecosystem here is exceptional.
You do have a point with frontier models, but most of the time you don’t need frontier models.
If I knew for sure I’d short Anthropic and retire early.