The Chinese models are cheap because no one is using them. But they can't actually afford (or have capacity) to serve enough people to kill the giants. This is evidenced by them all recently hiking prices or limiting usage.
It's possible that they build out in China at an unreal pace, China doesn't have concept of "community input" to drag down state projects, but then you are left giving your IP to China. Just ask western hardware businesses how well that goes.
If compute is the moat, that doesn’t really make their position any less precarious.
They're guaranteed to get over whatever hump you think they're in unironically. Uber/Tesla have been in far worse situations and despite Elon being an idiot/liar you see how they performed when even the most bullish of investors called for their heads
I just think the whole “moat” discourse is silly. OpenAI and Anthropic’s success depends on the same thing every business’s success depends on: their customer base, and their continued delivery of services their customers want to pay for. Not their tech or their compute or anything else. They have no moat because moats aren’t a thing.