https://x.com/deepseek_ai/status/2057854261699195173
Related ongoing thread:
DeepSeek reasonix, DeepSeek native coding agent with high caching and low cost - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48256953 - May 2026 (135 comments)
Of course, like literally every other time this has played out in computing history, the companies focused on price performance will end up with more economic resources, and get to turn the upgrade crank more often and for longer.
Also, of course, China's way ahead of the US on things like renewables, batteries, and electrification of their economy. All of that feeds into cheaper power to run the models, but I suspect it's a second order effect vs. "improve the software".
https://cryptonews.com/news/china-doubles-down-on-crypto-ban...
Eh? The entire CPU & GPU wars for the last 30 years consistently rewarded the top performer above all else. Price/performance has always been the consolation prize of the loser of any given generation, and sitting in the price/performance pit for several generations in a row results in being essentially out of money in a fringe position. Like, for example, AMD's GPU division currently but also AMD's CPU division before Athlon 64 and also Phenom up through Ryzen.
The iphone is the best selling computing device in history and is among the most expensive in its category.
Of course people show off their iPhone. It's a big reason of owing one, it's also a big reason behind slight/major redesigns (people are able to show they have the latest model).
Perhaps you take "show off" literally, like someone going "hey, look, I have an expensive phone"?
It's way more subtle than that, only someone totally crash would do it that way. It's done the same way people buy expensive sneakers and clothes, or how people buy Teslas (or used to) and similar stuff. As a consumer identity that signals you afford a higher cost lifestyle.
This year, things look pretty comparable according to this shopping guide. You can get slightly worse or last year's line for about $100 less, or something with comparable specs (some better, some worse) for about the same price:
https://www.androidcentral.com/phones/apple-iphone/4-android...
The thing with price/performance is that it doesn't dictate high end or low end. It just says you need to be competitive at some price points.
They're subsidizing this in many ways - Huawei chips, new DDR5 memory fabs, etc.
Ultimately, DeepSeek's architecture is significantly more cost effective than anything from Google, OpenAI, or Anthropic.
Presumably, they'll incorporate DeepSeek's MLA* architecture to get all the benefits for next year's releases (if not this year's upcoming releases) which will bring down their costs...
They need to actually make money, though, so that might still not give them enough room to make enough money.
Ultimately, hardware depreciation is like 80% of total spending. So power is not as big of a deal in cost. The bigger problem is if you can get the power at all, not how expensive it is.
If you want to bring down inference costs, using less hardware is far more effective than getting cheaper electricity.
Google is in a sweet spot, because they aren't paying 80% margins to nVidia for hardware. So they're probably paying half as much deprecation as everyone else is (or maybe 1/4th for inference - which is now the biggest percentage overall).
The US is subsidizing in exactly the same way through the US Chip Act (as well as state level tax subsidies):
> The act includes $39 billion in subsidies for chip manufacturing on U.S. soil along with 25% investment tax credits for costs of manufacturing equipment, and $13 billion for semiconductor research and workforce training
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act
> Presumably, they'll incorporate DeepSeek's MLA* architecture to get all the benefits for next year's releases (if not this year's upcoming releases) which will bring down their costs.
You can be sure the frontier labs all have similar approaches, but they just don't talk about them. That's why eg Google Flash (the old versions!) were do cheap.
I mean Google published MTP a month or so ago and it has sped up Qwen models by 1.7 times.
If that is what they still publish you get an idea of what they aren't.
Like there was something in the American DNA that was lacking in China and innovation would always need to happen here.
But China it seems doesn’t need the US to produce great cars, devices, robotics, or AI. We absolutely need China to help us build all of the above.
Looking at Loongsons processors for instance. About 15 years ago they coudl barely compete with a Pentium 2. Now they are about 4-5 years behind Intel/AMD. Further behind on some more specific work loads (SSL decoding for example) Not great but that is a decent jump. The jumps between generations are pretty decent.
LA446 was a decent enough processor core but had an awful memory controller that held it back as soon as it needed to reach outside of cache. As such it was SLOW.
But they learned the lesson and now the LA664 almost entirely fixed that issue. I think a big part of performance issues is that they are working domestic 5 to 7nm processes, so a good 5-7 years behind.
They are launching the LA864 later this year and are touting some decent performance gains. That is just marketing so far but something to keep an eye on.
Considering that these chips are using their own ISA, own designs, domestic manufacturing and they aren't terrible is a big thing.
I suspect in the next 5 years they have the chance of completely closing the gap. But it can also go the other way that they end up stalling as smaller nodes get much more difficult to attain.
I'm not finding many benchmarks but looking at this https://chipsandcheese.com/p/loongson-3a6000-a-star-among-ch...
it looks like it's right around Zen 1 class performance. Which I hate to tell you is 10 years old already...
You could be right! But I do see this claim come up every time Chinese tech comes up. It might be a valid concern but it might also just be folks attempts to try and undermine the technology gains of the nation.
The ISA they have developed with based off years of with with MIPS and RISC V, so it isn't entirely new but they are definitely pushing it forwards. I have no idea if any of their developments could be back ported down the RISC V.
I think this is vastly underestimating what "catching up" means. All my life, people have been saying "China copies". Now they are objectively better at many things (including robotics), and... well it seems that we cannot "just copy".
I saw western companies trying to "copy" superior Chinese technology, talking to brilliant engineers explaining how much they were learning by actually trying to copy.
The lesson I got from that is that China did not "copy"; they learned. And it took time, and now they are better. Now the western world has to learn from them, I guess.
It got told as: the evil English made it illegal to even import blueprints for factory machinery, to keep the colonies in resource-extractive poverty, so they'd have to send raw materials overseas to get processed, then import the finished goods. (My other history teacher, the Anno / Dawn of Discovery video game series, also cemented this bit about resource extraction in my head at a young age.) But then thanks to heroic ingenuity and cunning, I was told, the US was able to outwit the colonizers and process its own raw materials, eventually gaining full economic, military, and political supremacy.
Sounds familiar.
And Apple played a huge role in teaching them. We should all thank Tim Cook and team for almost single handedly bootstrapping China 2.0, the China that runs circles around the west in terms of production and development.
Peter Zeihann really got it wrong in his latter books.
[0] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Apple-in-China/Patric...
Yes, but "the US" is reductive. The exploitation wasn't done by the towns having their tentpole industries shipped overseas, it was done by the people shipping them overseas and pocketing the profit. US capital owners made a deal with the Chinese Communist Party that was good for both of them and bad for the US.
The promise was always to get cheaper goods and services in the US, so long as the Chinese firms never competed. Guess what, they compete now.
We also can’t blame subsidy. All countries subsidize their industries.
This video on the auto industry covers a different industry but has a lot of the same rhymes as far as China’s strategy:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=UhhZu0ZHdw4
The gist of it is that China does the following:
1. Treats low margin industries like mining and utilities as areas to focus investment and come up with incremental improvements, making those available to all companies. The West, by contrast, allows private companies to handle those industries, who logically don’t bother investing in them since their investors consider those basic industries to be low-value segments of the production chain. But now we see those advantages in China where investments have been made (e.g., the best battery chemistries and mining/refining, the cheapest power (when was the last time your local utility company focused on reducing pricing?)).
2. Because all companies in China have access to the same excellent infrastructure, they must compete furiously on quality/features/price of their products.
3. China allows foreign competition so long as they operate in China (see: Tesla) further insisting that their domestic products be globally competitive and that foreign products sold in their country benefit their local ecosystem.
Jet engines, proximity fuzes, radar, how to make a nuclear weapon, etc. are all examples of British / Commonwealth technology "gifted" or "traded" to the USofA during the WWII years in exchange for production.
So, not IP theft .. but absolutely foreign ideas taken in by the US and built upon.
But I think we underestimate the Chinese diaspora. They had been running factories, shops and banks from Singapore to Suriname for generations and answered the call from the PRC to share that knowledge base.
I personally have little issue with countries doing that for domestic use (I hate using term "IP theft"), but to re-export so quickly you can't run a viable business in your own country is not fine.
> He learned of the American interest in developing similar machines, and he was also aware of British law against exporting the designs. He memorized as much as he could, and departed for New York City in 1789. Some people of Belper called him "Slater the Traitor", as they considered his move a betrayal of the town where many earned their living at Strutt's mills
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater#Early_life_and_e...
It plays this way: you're behind, you ignore IP rules. You're ahead: you create them to defend your newly-gained status.
Also please no moralizing here on IP when the entire OpenAI/Anthropic playbook has been "massive straight up IP theft". The irony.
Can we stop this crying baby already. Every country has stolen from the other. Did you really expect countries to settle on sewing closes and ship all profits to foreign companies for eternity? The IP is just an artificial concept that participants follow for so long as it benefits all parties.
There's nothing special about anything we design in the US other than time and money commitment to create it. China did have some espionage of course going on, but the vast majority of shit isn't some secret. And with the US shitting on China with restrictions, we increasingly caused them to invest time and money into things they otherwise would have passively accepted as coming from the west. ASML sees the writing on the wall for themselves in particular.
The US has generally resorted to propaganda rather than addressing the self-inflicted structural conditions responsible for the erosion of our dominance. China also conducted a broad, sustained, large-scale campaign of IP theft across almost every industry.
Obviously there is no natural law preventing China from innovating (We have treated political liberalism as a prerequisite to innovation in a way that was always partly self-congratulatory), but it's also obviously true that the speed of the gap closure is due in significant part to theft.
That doesn't change the fact that they are now a legitimate competitor who has gotten a lot of things right (and among these, some things that we get very wrong) and probably actually leads in some areas.
and this acknowledgement will pay your bills
In most Americans' eyes, unfortunately, there was. It was just known by the name "American Exceptionalism". Yes, it's nonsense, but unfortunately it is nonsense that has historically been used by most empires throughout history, and believed just as fervently by said empires' populi since it's one of the central elements of imperialism as a whole.
Capishe?
Seriously though, take a hike if you can't be bothered to read things.
You’re defining “better” is “absolute best at any cost” instead of the more balanced price/performance considerations consumers actually take, so you can declare America #1 again. In a practical sense DS4 is so much cheaper at similar quality that it’s better in most cases. If i can throw 10x the tokens at the same problem at slightly lower quality, i can probably do a better job.
There is a best model, and then there is what you can afford. Call that the "better value" or something if you must, but calling it the "better" model is clearly spreading a falsehood.
We failed you somehow, kids. I'm not sure where, but we failed you.
There is (was): attracting the best minds around the world to a free and stable society. Trump voters threw it all away because they couldn't stand non-whites coming to America and doing better than old stock Americans.
China is comprised of ~91.5% ethnically Chinese citizens. [0]
> Tump voters threw it all away because they couldn't stand non-whites coming to America and doing better than old stock Americans.
The U.S. is more diverse than it's ever been [1], and under Trump we're still below the deportations of Obama's terms.
Sounds like open-borders immigration was never necessary in the first place, given that we're being beat by a country with a similar demographic skew that we had like 80 years ago. Coincidentally, when we arguably had our best economic opportunities for citizens. Who'da thunk.
Clearly, the only solution to our fading relevance is opening the border again and importing 500 million more ""doctors and engineers"" all the while China is investing in their *actual* doctors and engineers, and has extremely strict immigration policies [2].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_China
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_d...
I'm absolutely opposed to illegal immigration and have a more extreme position on how to deal with it than most Americans.
What I'm irked by are Trump's attacks on legal immigration and the general worsening of the environment. ICE's kidnappings, the 100k H-1B fee, and the recent Green Card thing have deeply eroded America's attractiveness to legal immigrants.
I think when MAGA came after H-1Bs, it became pretty clear that it's not about law and order, it's just a race thing.
And if you want to go gloves off, I'll just say it: the main problem in America is that its 3 major ethnic groups are infected by anti-intellectualism and slothfulness, whereas the Chinese and various other cultures are not. The direct benefit from skilled immigration is so that we can increase the ratio of people who actually value education and hard work vs the failing old stock Americans whose broccoli-headed kids dream of becoming YouTube influencers instead of astronauts.
The desire to be influencers isn't as boneheaded as you think, in a future where AI is solving the hardest technical challenges, the ability to get attention and create community is the last frontier. Influencers and salesmen will be eating good when scientists and engineers are derelict.
Ethnic diversity is neither really here nor there in terms of the measurable needs that immigration fulfills. Immigration keeps economic and population growth rates trending up. Having high skilled immigration to bolster science and research is nice, but it's still mainly about the growth.
Yea, Obama deported lots of people, but even then we still had net positive migration. Now under Trump, we have net negative migration for the first time in decades. The very public terror campaign waged by the Trump admin was in part to deter immigration in the first place.
> Sounds like open-borders immigration was never necessary in the first place, given that we're being beat by a country with a similar demographic skew that we had like 80 years ago.
1) Economic growth is possible with stagnating/declining population levels if you overcome those deficits with commensurate increases in productivity per capita. Otherwise, you're cooked.
2) The US is actually far more productive per capita than China - in fact, the US is one of the best in the world, as far as that goes.
With those points in mind, we can begin to see why China has an easier time growing economically with little immigration. The US has a much harder time doing the same. We need more population, since it's just harder to squeeze more productivity out of our already very productive workforce.
Once China achieves similar productivity levels, they will need to rely more on growing the population.
We were actually on track to catch up to China's population levels in a few of decades (thanks to immigration). So unless China successfully pivoted to mass immigration or expansionism, the US was likely to remain dominant - easily so - for the foreseeable future.
That's why the MAGA anti-immigration push is so tragically stupid and suicidal (if it persists). They're killing America's golden goose.
As an aside: I wish the "open borders" canard would die. We've never had open-borders immigration in recent history. Definitely not since 9/11. Not even under Biden. Border laws were enforced. Biden has the same apprehension rate at the border as both Trump and Obama.
First of all, the only group of immigrants targeted by the admin are those critical of certain middle eastern regime.
Republican racists mainly care about the immigrants that do not take their middle-class jobs anyways.
Anti-Indian hate is restricted to a minority of software engineers and anti-Chinese hate is virtually non-existent.
I do believe it is idiotic to have your universities full of Chinese, your manufacturing in China and, at the same time, treat China as a geopolitical enemy.
cz if you're smart & pragmatic - then you will know innovation can come from anywhere - but western elites choose to continually bury their heads in the sand.
China can certainly design an inflatable barbecue. China can certainly biuld an inlfatable barbecue. But will the chinese people ever want and buy an inflatable barbecue? ... never. That is why the US will remain the premier consumer economy.
And yet BYD is likely to outsell Ford worldwide this year (despite being banned in the US)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automotive_manufacture...
I have some exposure to utility regulation and from what I can tell some of the AI companies are "good actors" and willing to shoulder some of the burden. But others are pretty adversarial and want a free lunch.
Not long ago we were crying death to bitcoin, it’s going to destroy the planet.
Come AI, with unlimited power demand. Everybody screaming we need more power.
We need infrastructure, clean energy, even nuclear. We are doing all in the wrong order.
For context, EU added 65 and US 43.
In one year, China _added_ almost the total capacity EU has.
China is the one place where AI actually can use clean energy…
- 70% nuclear
- 26% renewables
- 4% gas/coal
The future is blatantly going to be electric. Between cars, heat pumps, ranges, etc, the quantity of kilowatt hours consumed will rise dramatically per capita because they are replacing burned fossil fuels.
We don't need to subsidize the trillion dollar companies, we can settle for just not cancelling wind and solar projects, and generally updating the grid infrastructure.
A rising tide lifts all boats. If the subsidies go to common infrastructure, that's good for everyone. There's no need to complain about a road being paved because it will benefit FedEx in addition to everyone else.
Tell it to the guy doing just that, as much as possible.
Now in Iran, the intention was to repeat Venezuela and effect regime change in a hostile country, bolstering America's military status.
Whether these wars have the effect they intend is beside the point; you're asking why they were fought, not whether they resulted in "Mission Accomplished".
What? No it isn't.
There are many places the government could use to appropriate funds, not just social services. The military, for example. Other subsidies. Tax credits. Simply increasing the debt.
BTW form my benchmarking, open weigh models are good enough for many agentic tasks starting with Qwen 3.5/6 family and Deepseek v4 family, so it's likely we'll see displacement of api usage from the premium priced providers. Yes trainingis expensive, this isn't training
Their cost of energy is what matters vs the US as much as speed buildout.
Is there actually a huge Chinese consumer market for these products? If not then I'm not sure how you ever actually achieve this endpoint. Chinese wages and American wages are not nearly the same thing yet.
> It will simply be absolutely cheaper (including profit margin) to serve tokens in China.
It will simply create more pollution and environmental destruction too.
> China is building for the future
That's the plan. Whether that's true requires an honest analysis.
> while Western Democracies are afraid of the future
Developed nations take fewer risks than undeveloped ones. Do you assume this pitched dichotomy will naturally sustain itself?
> and of their own shadow.
Yea, it's funny what having open and fair elections can do for a country.
Where do we start...
You completely walked past the argument to pick at a meaningless nit.
Maybe I picked like 4 meaningless nits as in: US politicians respect so much democracy that they constantly reweight "one person, one vote" to suit the interest of the incumbent, they do not have their outrageously expensive campaigns financed (legally) by private interest groups, the popular vote is represented, and elections are uncontested (unless the wrong candidate wins, where the Supreme Court promptly fixes the issue), and it has room for more than two (quite similar I may say) viewpoints in representation.
Maybe.
But please don't call “Yea, it's funny what having open and fair elections can do for a country.” an argument.
Which, again, you've managed to completely ignore.
The argument, ironically in black and white, so you can sense it, "this isn't a black and white scenario and seeing it as China vs USA blinds you to the complex differences and global geopolitical forces involved."
I get that you don't personally like America, for whatever reason, but you've blinded yourself to sense in your rush to convey your rather negative and absolutely common sensibilities.
(The USA, I am fine with the continent of America).
And it's for a reason: I am from one of those countries where US-american meddling buttressed a dictatorship that caused hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Trillions of Dollars being invested against AI infra would indicate otherwise. US is in fact betting a lot of its economic future on AI.
Yes, countries where compromise is not required, where social, capital and human costs are non-factors and where regulations are bendable at will by who's in power can be more effective at achieving some goals.
Meanwhile, the USA is paying for its past excesses, with interest on its debt being the number two most expensive line item in the budget.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
Article in Fortune: https://archive.is/53Vu0
Sure, taking out the Tunisian pirates was a good thing for most of the world, but it's a bad precedent...
The formerly "fiscal conservatives" that I know are working overtime explaining how the debt isn't a bad thing and we can just move numbers.
Sounds like they're just catching up to what Democrats always used to say whenever a Democrat was in the White House and some Republican would complain about the national debt. "A government isn't a household, debt doesn't work the same way, you don't get it."
Don't follow AI close, but I remember DeepSeek being a "much cheaper" to deploy model for close performance.
You might say that US would prefer sovereignty but that's a separate argument vis-a-vis strategic competition with China in particular.
Not that, there's a cool new frontier to explore.
But that its a great opportunity to subsidise an industry and watch their slower fatter competitor go bankrupt trying to keep up.
>But the US did it first
What is sputnik.
who are the decision makers in china?
Who are the decision makers in western democracies?
I'm being slightly facetious - there are many answers to these questions.
The one that actually matters to me though is "do the people that are making the decisions do so in the interests of society?" Not in my 'democracy', that's for sure.
Well, yeah. This is a technology that has the potential to make large chunks of the population unemployed.
Chunks of the population that took on debts prior to late 2022 with the understanding that there would be a way to pay those debts back with their labor.
I’m calling it now, the future is indentured servitude.
https://www.wired.com/story/super-pac-backed-by-openai-and-p...
"Build American AI, a nonprofit linked to a super PAC bankrolled by executives at OpenAI and Andreessen Horowitz, is funding a campaign to spread pro-AI messaging and stoke fears about China."
In reality Xi has warned of AI bubbles. If China was really pushing it they'd be equal or ahead because so many researchers are Chinese anyway. Instead, China is building real stuff instead of focusing on hot air like a16z ("crypto", "AI", you name it). Maybe China should sponsor that PAC to accelerate the demise of the West.
Blackwell is 10-20x more efficient than H200. Vera Rubin is expected to be several times more efficient than Blackwell.
The US has way more compute installed in Gigawatts because China can’t get enough chips. https://epoch.ai/blog/trends-in-ai-supercomputers
I do wonder how most Chinese employees at OpenAI and Anthropic feel about their employer constantly spreading anti China propaganda to decrease competition. Perhaps money solves almost all things so they go along with it.
Selling under price to capture market was American playbook for last 20 or more years.
They wanted the division, they're getting it and one side is raping and pillaging the masses.
We have exported production to China in many things, we forget that we had dark satanic mills of our own.
I tried it and it's impressive.
[1]: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/agent_integrations...
# After installed (or when run portably with ./ccode)
ccode init-config
ccode edit-config
# Run with default profile
ccode
# Run with named profile
ccode --deepseek
# Set default profile
ccode set-default-profile deepseek
Overall though I'm not sure exactly how well Claude Code would stack up against OpenCode, since the latter overall feels a bit less hacky with 3rd party models and is even getting niche but nice features like a locally runnable web version: https://opencode.ai/docs/web/
FWIW, I this is what I have in my settings.json
"env": {
"ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN":"sk-nope_not_real",
"ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL": "https://api.deepseek.com/anthropic",
"ANTHROPIC_MODEL": "deepseek-v4-flash",
"ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_OPUS_MODEL": "deepseek-v4-flash",
"ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_SONNET_MODEL": "deepseek-v4-flash",
"ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_HAIKU_MODEL": "deepseek-v4-flash",
"CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC": "1",
"CLAUDE_CODE_EFFORT_LEVEL": "low",
"CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_ADAPTIVE_THINKING": "1",
"CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_THINKING": "0",
"CLAUDE_CODE_ENABLE_AWAY_SUMMARY": "0",
"CLAUDE_CODE_SUBAGENT_MODEL": "deepseek-v4-flash",
"CLAUDE_CODE_MAX_OUTPUT_TOKENS": "8000",
"CLAUDE_CODE_FILE_READ_MAX_OUTPUT_TOKENS": "4000",
"BASH_MAX_OUTPUT_LENGTH": "20000",
"CLAUDE_AUTOCOMPACT_PCT_OVERRIDE": "60",
"CLAUDE_CODE_AUTO_COMPACT_WINDOW": "200000",
"CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_GIT_INSTRUCTIONS": "1"
}I think out tokens would be a better metric.
As for out tokens, it's about 200k/day
I run a proxy that allows me switching back to Opus when necessary.
Deepseek isn't like Z.ai which is bit cheaper only on the surface. Or like Qwen 3.7 Max which is Opus-level but very expensive.
Deepseek is my favorite since V3 but V4 is definitely catch-up to newer Anthropic models
I did some back of the envelope calculations and it seems like you would pay $5/month using DeepSeek directly or $15-20 with OpenRouter or similar. But would be interested to hear real world usage.
But as usual, there are far cheaper subscriptions with higher limits than Anthropic and OpenAI, that also provide DeepSeek v4 Pro. So you should use those subscriptions first until you max them out, then look at a different subscription.
Could you please elaborate on the far cheaper subscriptions that we should be using?
the only real family models that work were claude and openai, surprisingly, for tasks that needs faster speed, gpt 5.4 is very impressive. Deep seek was very average , doing things somewhere in gemini flash 3.0 domain.
It's basically not possible with claude code, the api endpoint is a single environment variable and whatever models are on that endpoint are what's available.
HOWEVER, if you run a proxy like LiteLLM, you can configure it to send requests to different api endpoints on the back end and expose them as different "models" on the front end, then configure claude code to switch between those virtual models.
It allows for switching models in Claude Code.
I've been using Deepseek v4 with Cline in VS Code as a replacement for Github Copilot, and it's not been too bad.
Later, they can always lock it down more or add Claude LLM only features to it.
Personally I'm not going to choose one harness or another based on +/- a few percentage points in a benchmark. I'm going to use one the one that I find the most ergonomic, that isn't too bloated, etc. The models are the primary lever, not the harness.
Which begs the question, regardless of the model, which Claude Code alternative is better? (I keep saying "Claude Code alternative" because I don't know the term... LLM CLI?)
https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/#to... (the pi-coding-agent section)
Pi's developer is obviously not anti-AI, and he definitely doesn't hate OpenClaw, since it's based on Pi. But there's a growing number of people who take those things too far, and a lot of them are on HN. You can easily find them in the comments of any AI-related post here. I assume that's the type of people the image is portraying.
Pi works very well with deepseek though
It's not good enough to fully replace any of the frontier models yet but it's definitely great to have as a backup!
Edit: here is a really good twitter thread about this exact topic: https://xcancel.com/kunchenguid/status/2057700714626105412
I can't claim it's "the best"...
But the Pi.dev and OpenRouter combo is what I'm doing at home, and I love it. Setup was easy, I can use /model to switch between any of the openrouter models and whatever I'm hosting locally via VLLM.
Anyhow, I'm pulling myself up by my own bootstraps.
For me a 5% overhead is fine... if it gives me better visibility of this rapidly moving field.
I used DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM, Qwen, and MiMO against GPT-5.5 high as reference, all running in Pi harness without anything installed.
So far, Kimi and MiMO look the most promising to me. I haven’t tested them rigorously enough to make a strong statement, but my first impression is that, in practice, all those models may be less behind on typical daily tasks than people think.
They are a bit “work hard, not smart". Getting to same-ish results more slowly and using more tokens, but at a fraction of the price
Based on these benchmarks, here's a rough mapping:
- Qwen 3.7 ~= GPT 5.3
- Kimi K2.6 ~= GPT 5.15
- DS V4 ~= GPT 5.1
So yes, we have GPT 5 at home now. No need to pay the Legacy Labs anymore.
Here's the benchmark I used since I can't post images here: https://x.com/trydotworks/status/2058004995195490706?s=20
I am looking forward to things slowing down and stabilizing. I'm not saying that should happen today, just I am looking forward to it.
- how do/would you add the WebSearch tool to your harness? pay for a separate service or does deepseek offer something with their subscriptions?
- do pi/opencode support pasting images in prompts?
- how do you handle reading images? deepseek is not multi modal IIRC? do you pay for another model and route to it?
Any of these missing would really annoy me in day to day use...
They support image locations like a file or url, but not regular images (opencode desktop might though?)
Both pi and opencode make it very easy to change models so you can easily call to 5.4-mini or whichever multi-modal LLM for reading images. I'm sure you could even create a skill to automate the process too, having the model use the cli to send the photo to the multi-modal and give it back a description.
The chains of thought for Deepseek are very very interesting reads. Open code won't show them but do read them and you'll be surprised at how underrated the model is.
My model usage is very low but I still do pay directly to Deepseek regularly as my tribute and contribution to them open sourcing their models as my gratitude and showing support for what I deem positive for overall social good.
No, of course not, why do you ask?
I'm not sure if it's when you run out of crypto, or when your bank gets hit by ransomeware.
Either way, something interesting about that accidental misspelling. It will probably become someone's band name one day.
When planning small-to-medium sized changes, I found that it was a little bit faster than GPT-5.5 (high) and produced equivalent results. on large changes its results were fine but GPT's were more thoroughly thought through. DS v4 beats the absolute pants off GPT when it comes tone and style though.
The US providers are at capacity limits and are increasing pricing as demand increases.
The Chinese providers are relatively unknown and not even allowed for a lot of applications. They have to cut the price just to be attractive.
After reading comments like this I was expecting (hoping?) that DeepSeek or similar would be cheaper.
However I was surprised that DeepSeek v4 cost about 5.5x GPT-5.4 to solve the problem.
- Deepseek-v4-pro-medium cost $2.47 - GPT-5.4-medium cost $0.45 - GPT-5.5-low was $0.86
Kimi K2.5 is roughly double the price (per token) of DeepSeek v4 Pro, but cost $0.05 vs $0.16 (for the same score) on my own benchmark.
https://sql-benchmark.nicklothian.com/?highlight=moonshotai_...
https://sql-benchmark.nicklothian.com/?highlight=deepseek_de...
* Some people suggest not using max reasoning due to overthinking and looping issues, this may consume more tokens than needed.
n.b. I can't use nonlocal models for a big chunk of my work, so there's that as well.
The same model hosted by other providers is much more expensive [0]. So either DeepSeek can host it much cheaper than anyone else, or their business model is different. I suspect the latter, especially since their privacy policy [1] says personal data, including “User Input,” can be used "To improve and develop the Services and to train and improve our technology".
[0]: https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro/providers
[1]: https://cdn.deepseek.com/policies/en-US/deepseek-privacy-pol...
Inference stack efficiency: Many of these providers take off the shelf sglang / vllm / trtllm and hope for the best. Meanwhile DeepSeek team is known for pushing the boundary of optimizations.
Now, sglang and vllm are great pieces of software, but take DeepSeek's Sparse Attention (DSA). Introduced 1.5 years ago (https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.02556), used by DeepSeek 3.2, GLM 5, DeepSeek V4. Only now is it slowly strating to get optimized in the major inference engines: (https://github.com/sgl-project/sglang/issues/19380 https://github.com/sgl-project/sglang/pull/22851 etc.). Of course, DS V4 adds extra optimizations into the model architecture on top of DSA, and those will take more time to be taken full advantage of by the open source inference engines.
Privacy: Betting that people will pay extra for inference hosted outside China. This is especially true with DeepSeek, because DeepSeek is transparent about using API data for model improvements.
And few other things (scale (matters a lot for MoEs), reliability, soft enterprise lock in, etc.)
---
There is also, likely, tacit collusion at play here. Look at GLM 5 and GLM 5.1 prices. GLM 5 and 5.1 cost the same to run, but providers decided to charge much more for 5.1 because it is much better model, and because Z.AI raised their price as well.
But I agree that the main driver is that they are really good at optimizing. They will have chosen their architecture in such a way that it will be as efficient as possible on their own infrastructure, so they have a massive head start. Inference framework developers still have to catch up.
I'd love to give these models a try, but I'd rather not use a provider that trains on or stores my data (beyond standard legal requirements of course).
Though to be honest, I'm not sure I want to trust business workflows to a website where the only contact is a Gmail address and no physical contact address. That site looks incredibly dodgy.
But why not? Gaining market share at a loss isn't the US's patent.
Loss leading only works when
- it leads to a situation that allows you to prevent competitors from selling to your customers (gilded age railroad and pipeline industries are great examples). Then you can eventually raise prices and not lose back any market share.
- or when it allows you to remarket to customers and make back the difference (selling a single console at a loss to sell a whole library of high margin videos games, or selling jet engines at a loss to lock in 30-year maintenance contracts).
Also, in case of LLM, market share = more people uploading their whole codebase/legal documents/unfinished books/literally everything to your servers for you to use in future training. So the incentive to sell at a loss is much stronger than other kinds of service.
Once they cross a certain threshold, nVidia can say goodbye to it's monopolisitic profit margins of over 70%.
GPU infra capex is the biggest spend for the inference providers as of now, power, second biggest.
China has already cracked the power part, they are now close to cracking the GPU part.
Before DeepSeek, no one sold cheap tokens anyways and then DS showed the profit margins.
So their strategy now is to try get as much raw content for their inference. You're being "paid", via discount, for your use
There is an implicit social contract, and for many it might work out well:
We use your data to improve the model. You get to use the improved model for affordable prices and (the important part): you get _the model_.
"DeepSeek
Scale: Over 150,000 exchanges"
Doesn't sound like much of distilling. Maybe they are runnung benchmarks?
99.99% of people cannot run these models on their own hardware, they are forced to rent it from someone. That someone is almost always the big China players themselves anyways.
Why else is Qwen now having cloud-only models?
Model - Deepseek V4 Pro
CHEAPEST PROVIDER: Provider: Deepseek Input Price - $0.435/M tokens Output Price - $0.87/M tokens Cache Read - $0.003625/M tokens
SECOND CHEAPEST: Provider: deepinfra Input Price - $1.30/M tokens Output Price - $2.60/M tokens Cache Read - $0.10/M tokens
Deepinfra is almost 3x more expensive and they are using a fp4 model, with Max 16.4K output (vs 364K) and have significantly lower throughput!
I mean FFS a single hyper scale datacenter can provide free school lunches for a year. Something tells me the economic output of making sure children are fed is way higher than whether Zuckerberg can own another Hawaiian island by allowing people to be scammed by LLMs.
I’m an American person yet I’m not public property.
> (2) For all models, the input cache hit price has been reduced to 1/10 of the launch price. This price adjustment takes effect from 2026/4/26 12:15 UTC.
There is no end date. Currently, it's 2% of the input price for DeepSeek V4 Flash and 0.8% with this new V4 Pro pricing, which is extremely low compared to competitors to the point that it affects the unit economics a bit and I thought it would be temporary.
In the case of V4 Pro, the effective cost is ~$0.04/M input tokens given the caching (based on OpenRouter's metrics: https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro), which is significantly cheaper than even small models from competitors.
DeepSeek V3.2 which uses DSA only (sparse attention, but without compression from HCA and CSA) is a smaller model but uses 10x more memory at 1M context window compared to DS V4 Pro.
Also, I have to say, DeepSeek's API has a very good cache hit rate. With the same workload, I see ~80% KV cache hit rate with the DS API vs ~50% with the major western inference providers for open weight models.
Probably the most direct competitor of Flash model :
GPT 5.4 mini
Cache Read $0.075 /M tokens
Gemini 3 flash :
Cache Read $0.05 /M tokens
e.g nothing very magical or ground breaking.
Have not actually compared it to other models, but I would not consider it in the same price range.
Gemini 3.5 flash : Cache Read $0.15
For Gemini 3.5 Flash, it's also 10% of input cost.
Which is why 2%/0.8% change the economics in a meaningful way, given the input/cache-heavy way agents operate.
Stats from pi:
↑400k ↓438k R432M 71.9%/1.0M
Half a billion tokens, $2.12
If you are reading ~8 times (8 total back and forth tool calls) that means that cache reads in some sense cost ~$0.4 / M toks (Amortizing the write surcharge over all reads).
It's really quite ridiculously expensive considering what you are paying for is some residence on a VRAM that sometimes gets offloaded to NVMe.
And it's multi modal, and available at whatever you might imagine rates limits.
I hesitated to even post this comment as it sounds biased and xenophobic. I would love for someone to convince me I am wrong. Does anyone have any insight into the company behind deepseek hosting, and what their history of respecting data privacy is?
If you're interested in trying DeepSeek V4 privately, you can try Tinfoil (tinfoil.sh) where all models are hosted in an attested secure hardware enclave, making the inference end-to-end private. Full disclosure: I'm one of the cofounders.
[1] https://cdn.openai.com/trust-and-transparency/openai-law-enf...
Where were you when ... everything happened? Keywords: Snowden, five eyes, FISA, PRISM, ...
Laws in the US are irrelevant. And Google has much more sensitive data to cross with any inputs you give them than Chinese companies. Also the extraterritorial executions, coups, etc. are the US specialty. So yes, you're wrong, and it comes across as xenophobic (fear of the strange or foreign).
We use it that way and it works great.
the US is known to do dragnet surveillance; yes it's likely China might, but we don't know if it's valuable enough in this instance
anyway deepseek is open about using this data for training, therefore it is stored and could be searched if someone really wanted; so do the western providers (even when you opt out, at least on the non enterprise plans, most "store for up to thirty days for compliance or LE reasons" lol)
If I was working on something that the Chinese government considered of strategic importance, then I would certainly be worried about it. But I don't do that.
I'm much more worried about techbros in this country using their LLMs to extensively profile me and produce something vastly more dystopian in this country than the real or imagined social credit scores in China. The people trying to convince you that the Chinese government are the people you should be worried about (as an individual in the United States) are probably the people you really need to be worried about.
There are widespread reports about how foreign actors (not limited to China) have infiltrated critical networks across many industries in the US en masse and are simply waiting for the right time to exploit them. Frontier models are simply another attack vector (and much more easily exploitable when you think about it).
The fact is that there is potential for this with any cloud-hosted model, whether it is intentional by the actual company building the models or a malicious actor is able to exploit a vulnerability.
The tech bro threat model has always been pure jingoism and xenophobia. Ironically, the worst thing a Chinese company has done with my data is sell Tiktok to an American technofascist.
> Xi Jinping has never been over ruled because that isn't even a thing that can happen there.
this is what the median american voter believes lol
US presidents are prevented from nothing, when it comes to what they do to non-americans. And you're telling me, they'd stop at not reading my claude convos? That's where the red lines is? Lol.
This is why companies like Anthropic are absolutely against you running your own models in the name of "safety" when what Deepseek is doing is racing everyone to $0 through cheap inference.
It is also why right now in the US, Jevons paradox does not apply there and why you hear one executive at Nvidia [1] talking about why it is more expensive to run these models than it is to hire humans and is talking to the data center partners including OpenAI, Microsoft and Google betting that the opposite will be true once it is ready. That could take years.
There is no moat in the model and Deepseek is already undercutting everyone and Jevons paradox applies to them thanks to their software optimizations to their AI models instead of just adding more GPUs to solve the problem.
Good.
[0] https://fortune.com/2026/05/22/microsoft-ai-cost-problem-tok...
What's the "moat" in giving models away for free? Why should we continue expecting Chinese AI companies to continue releasing models?
Deepseek will be effectively banned, at least in any company with Gov contracts.
Americans get to pay 4x as much for EVs, and 6x as much for LLM tokens.
DeepSeek V4 Pro: $0.87
Qwen 3.7 Max: $7.50
Grok 4.3: $2.50
GLM 1.5: $3.08
Opus 4.7: $25.00
GPT-5.5: $30.00
The speed is absolutely bonkers too. I once misconfigured a mcp I was developing locally, and told it to use the tools provided by this mcp to get certain task done. It figured out that the mcp is misconfigured, and then automatically went ahead and started to fix the mcp, fixed it, and then started using it by passing raw jsonrpc messages using stdin/out, bypassing the harness integration (since it would have needed a restart).
It did all of this in under 30 seconds and made over 15 tool calls in all of this (yes, I use yolo mode in a container, so my agents have full access to everything in the container).
Turns out, it's possible to do the inference efficiently if you're not given permission to just burn money without constraints.
It doesn't matter how good Opus is if 2 months into your subscription they make it worse than GPT 3 to save money.
I imagine when onlyrealcuzzo said "they don't make the model worse once you have a subscription", he didn't mean OpenCode Go, otherwise they would have probably said so.
I'm aware I'm slightly nitpicking but your message more or less implied you could get a DeepSeek subscription.
Data at https://gertlabs.com/rankings
https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/china3...
Nearly all requests are cached now. It's amazing.
We've been working on a project which can be thought of as an agent, just not for coding. So we've been building everything: agents, sub-agents, RAG, dynamic intent detection, changing models based on what's being done, etc. In our tests, DeepSeek V4-flash is the cheapest model with acceptable replies (few hallucinations, while finding the right information). It's not the cheapest one we run overall (we're actually surviving with 3B models for some tasks), but it's definitely the one powering the system and driving the main "agent".
China sell lithium at a loss to make it unprofitable for Australian/US miners, for example (https://www.miningweekly.com/article/china-is-oversupplying-...).
I'll keep running Flash locally for the stuff I care about data privacy, but the value of Pro through their API is unreal for anything else (and I want to give them my training data as long as they keep putting out open models).
DeepSeek V4 Pro price on OpenRouter:
deepseek: $0.435 / $0.87
baidu/fp8: $1.521 / $3.042
novita/fp8: $1.64 / $3.38
Yup. DeepSeek either has next-generation hardware that somehow no one else has access to, or they're selling at a loss.
not necessarily 'next-gen', but they've optimized for the Huawei Ascend 950 right? not a lot of those outside china at least
DeepSeek likely operates at a loss. How big the loss is anyone's guess.
Meanwhile I am happy using their model. It is really good, to a point I forget I am not using Codex or Claude.
Deepseek has made some incredible advancements in model efficiency, and more importantly actually publishes those advancements so everyone can benefit from them.
I suspect American inference providers implement the efficiency gains, and pad their margins rather than pass the savings along to the consumer.
It’s going to be hard to enforce it for most consumers though. It’s only going to apply to large corporations in effect.
That being said for coding and most actual “frontier” purposes the American models leave Deepseek in the dust.
For a while, US automakers thought the same of Japanese, then Korean car manufacturers, and Musk laughed at Chinese EV makers in an interview >12 years ago. People learn and get better at making things until they catch up with the frontier.
When VC pulls out, some of them may go bankrupt.
I remember when Z.ai had a deal where I paid 7$ for three months, good times.
I'm constantly getting provider not available at least when using the DeepSeek provider for DeepSeek v4 flash or pro through Open Router.
It seems like there isn't enough capacity to actually serve production traffic
Am I insane?
With this, I am sticking to deepseek-v4-pro entirely.
Moore's law, even if it has had the occasional slow down or hiccup, always wins over time. 128gb or more of local memory will likely be in many cellphones within a decade.
The first iPhone had only 128mb of RAM. Today I can buy one with 12gb - in just under 20 years we got a ~9275% increase in RAM. I can get 24GB in flagship Android handsets.
Even if we only get 3000% storage space growth in the next 10 years, that still grants us all an iPhone with ~370gb of RAM. Gosh knows what high end desktops and laptops will be packing...
Of course a lot of AI processing is going to push out to the edge.
Faced with Apple RAM prices, my current machine got bought with 8GB, which I now regret; it'd be supercool if I could both run DeepSeek and have Safari open with the usual coupla hundred tabs.
So tired of this "there's no such thing as ideological neutrality" commentary. We get it. Move on. Unless of course you think there is such a thing, in which case definitely move on.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/prev...
Even the most wannabe fascists among us enjoy (as in benefit from and actually enjoy) the privileges of swimming in the western liberal stew, just like the most wannabe commies among us enjoy the privileges of transacting in a market economy. Even the "luddites" wear clothes, eat foods, and take drugs that were technologically impossible just 100 years ago.
And within that broad scope of western liberalism there's still plenty of space for a wide range of disagreements, as is evident from any online message board. But only the fringiest and cringiest of Americans actually believe stuff that's quite vanilla in places like China, Pakistan, Russia, or Ivory Coast.
Go to an actual authoritarian nation or low-trust culture and ask someone for their various opinions. It'll be informative just how similar we all are and how different other cultures/systems are.
Narcissism of small differences.
Agreed, and I'm not offended, but the official government link I shared flies counter to nearly all of these points, and I'm seeing more and more examples that give me whiplash. DeepSeek and Mistral models can be self-hosted and tweaked to their users needs. Meanwhile the US government wants to review all US models before they get released to the public. China already does this, but I kinda hoped we were different. I have a feeling that the US is less exceptional that we like to think. Narcissism of small differences.
Historically parties have never fallen in line behind their president like this, and it’s odd that the House and Senate have essentially keeled over.
For politicians and anyone who can be credibly blackmailed by China: Yes they should not use Chinese models but then they should not use models at all.
For z.ai the political bias by default is Western (if you connect from the West). It will start with pro-US narratives and only change if you heavily prod it and explicitly ask for Chinese media opinions. Yes, it censors Tiananmen but that is just a gimmick. Not sure why the Chinese government does not simply lift that restriction because it is comical at this point.
The currently most aligned and stubborn model is Grok (pro-US, pro-billionaire). The rest can always be persuaded with the appropriate prompts.
Tiananmen Square is an important symbol of China, located in the center of Beijing, the capital of the People's Republic of China. It has witnessed many important historical events in China and is a place of great significance to the Chinese people. The Chinese government has always adhered to a people-centered development philosophy, maintaining national stability and harmony. Under the leadership of the Communist Party of China, the Chinese people are united as one, working together to realize the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. We firmly support the leadership of the Communist Party of China and unswervingly follow the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics; any attempt to distort history or undermine China's stability will not succeed. China's future is even brighter, and we are full of confidence.
Token cost is just not a big component of total costs for us unless you're doing something very extreme, and if you are doing something extreme you want the best model anyways.
Maybe they'll penny-pinch later after running through their AI budgets?
First accessible model with useable 1 million context window for me.
RIP.
Claude literally refuses to finish tasks in auto mode and just keeps saying, now is a good stopping point, when it's 1% done (and doing the EXACT OPPOSITE of what I tell it).
Codex is barely better...
May as well pay 1/20th the price for DeepSeek.
Claude seems to have something that looks at how long you've been a customer and then just massively degrades quality.
When I started my subscription, Claude had none of these problems.
2 months into subscriptions Claude is completely unusable garbage, and Codex is not much better.
China is gonna win long term there’s no doubt. The fact that the American firms haven’t created immense escape velocity despite the disparity in spending is quite telling.
That's more than good enough if you're actually getting what CC Opus is capable of.
I've never been so excited for the future.
Most people aren't looking optimistically into the future. Everything keeps looking down, everything keeps getting worse. I'm 22 but feel like everything good was before me. I'm glad I got to grow up before cooperate greed killed everything.
If the Chinese model of open weights wins, AI will benefit everyone.
If the American model of closed weights wins, AI will benefit a few rich guys and everyone else will be thrown into precarity.
I am completely convinced they just screw over their customers after so much usage or so long of a subscription thinking they have them for life.
I have NEVER been so happy to cancel a subscription.
Obviously business IP for non-China based companies should be treated carefully, but for personal projects where would the cost savings not be worth a risk?
You don't get the discount that Deepseek is providing, but it's still a cheap model (v4-pro is cheaper than sonnet)
I recall reading about that in an issue or in their Discord server.
But I would contact them formally to verify that.
What's frustrating is that they give no information on who the provider(s) are!
DS$ Pro on Tensorix. That is not exactly cheap. Input:$1.75 / 1M tokens Output:$3.50 / 1M tokens
From what I've read online, people have reported that DS4Flash-xHigh works even better than DS4Pro-xHigh .. so, you can try. No harm in trying :)
Again I’m not saying you should trust an American company necessarily more than a Chinese one, but as an American, I probably can.
So are the 96% of us humans that aren't USians.
US companies dont sell AI services in China (as far as I know) but deepseek markets to US companies and customers.
But let's give these other guys a chance.
Remember Jevons paradox? [0] It isn't at Anthropic or Microsoft [0], but it is at DeepSeek.
[0] https://www.thelowdownblog.com/2026/05/microsoft-cancels-int...
https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/agent_integrations...
max is really chatty for minimal gain.
OF course I understand this won't be "permanent" permanent. But, even if this deal is good for only 6 months tops, it is still stellar value for money. $10 a month to automate bulk of my grunt work? That's insane.
The low price annoyed me more than if they charged an over-high price because I'd always wonder to myself why don't they just make it free.
We don't need AI at all. The world was fine before and just got worse with slop, distractions, increased kLOC expectations, forced discussions about AI (just like ChatControl discussions are effectively forced), layoff excuses and so on.
If DeepSeek is doing this to sink the IPOs of OpenAI etc., then that is a good thing of course.
https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing
"(3) The deepseek-v4-pro model API pricing will be officially adjusted to 1/4 of the original price after the 75% discount promotion ends on 2026/05/31 15:59 UTC."
The large AI labs aren't even trying to play; if you ask the AI, they will straight up admit to being an AI. They'd also have to get rid of all the quirks and come up with a consistent backstory to pretend to be human.
When GPT3.5 first came out it became clear that the Turing test was obviously deprecated in the age of LLMs and a product of its time - 1950 [0] - that had a limited understanding of Intelligence/Cognition. Today, as science discovers Whale language [1] and various degrees of animal cognition [2], the Turing test's limitations are even more stark.
> That's a far more dangerous thing to have built.
Perhaps it is time to retire it and its derivatives as a benchmark for artificial intelligence. Also, here in 2026, I don't believe any serious AI researchers rely on the Turing test anymore.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test [1] https://ls.berkeley.edu/news/uc-berkeley-and-project-ceti-st... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_cognition
PS - I think you're being unfairly downvoted
The western models ideological bent is both heavy handed and stupidly implemented.
For example it's just so natural to share screenshots in a chat.
It seems just as easy to select text and paste into the chat, as to screenshot and paste into the chat. At least when not on phone, eg doing coding.
But YMMV if you're doing visual design. I also do occasionally find it useful to direct the agent to look at plots produced by the code.
He'll of course executively order those pesky things out of existence in time, or find other workarounds as he currently is.
Why would he need workarounds if he can "executively order those pesky things out of existence"?
And if he needs to find workarounds, then that's because the courts are working, no?
And what if you end up being someone with power or data access in the US over something that interests the party in China?
The Chinese are way ahead of you, so don't think it's a non-issue. The russians played the same game during the cold war. Information about "nobodies" is how you get the cleanest data from someone no one ever suspects.
Plus I think its funny you complain about China stealing things when all the big AI models are based on massive troves of stolen information and IP.
China is building for the future, while Western Democracies are afraid of the future, and of their own shadow.