alt Hacker News> They’re doing it as a way to undermine the industry leaders and attract people to their brands.
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.
Replies
It is probably a naive point of view that I hold (I haven't thought it through properly) but the western capitalist version is that investors providing money to do dumping of prices is ok (as long as you are not considered a monopoly) and the Chinese state sponsored capitalism is considered dumping as it goes against the agreed WTO rules for how international trade is supposed to work. The western capitalist governments (probably with a lot of lobbying support) wrote the WTO rules. Not trying to defend either way, but it seems to be different economic and political systems trying to gain dominance over each other.
> Codex and Claude are both widely speculated to be sold at a loss (at least compared to API pricing)
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.