Amodei is convinced he's abraham prefiguring AI's christ. Very different than Altman's cold power-seeking. You can always trust someone who's selfish, since they'll always do whatever's in their benefit at all times.
Is that better? I'd much rather have someone trying to build a good product to sell to willing buyers at a fair price than some zealot who thinks he's going to usher in the second coming and end the world or something.
I mean paying for deepseek is sending money to China, and any company in China is pretty much an extension of the CCP (or can become one at the snap of their fingers). I don't think this is much better or worse than the American AI companies.
If that's a concern, an easy alternative is using companies like novita or fireworks.ai to run open source chinese models. They are incredibly price competitive, have strict data retention policies, and in general are quite fast. Also, you don't get used to a model and suddenly get rug pulled when the provider decide to upgrade.
It's a testament to how much American companies have been fucking over their own reputations that people would view them as not "better or worse" than an extension of the CCP.
A decade ago, just that kind of comparison would've been pretty unthinkable.
Deepseek proper is the only provider offering Deepseek V4 Pro at such an insanely low price. All the other providers are like 5x.
If someone says they're using Deepseek, it's probably a safe bet that they're sending money to China. People choose an inferior model (Deepseek) because it's cheaper. Not many people are willing to use Deepseek but also pay the 5x price to have an American company run it for them.
The $20/month Claude Code plan has incredibly low rate limits. $20/month of DeepSeek usage buys you a lot. Even more so in hobby projects where usage is bursty, not nicely distributed over a work week
Dario is constantly fearmongering to generate press, gaslighting, and contradicting himself. Mythos is the most recent example of that. It was never too powerful to release, that was a lie to generate publicity and fear, and an excuse because they didn't have the compute to serve it. People were finding the same bugs and exploits using GPT5.4, GPT5.5, and lesser models. Now all of a sudden, they do have the compute, and now they're saying that Mythos is releasing in the coming weeks.
Anthropic is constantly caught up in ethical scandals too. They pump the web full of advertising bots. They steal peoples tokens, punish you for disabling telemetry, blacklist people they don't like. They had remote code execution vulns in their product for nearly a year and secretly buried that fact, no disclosures at all. Here are some of them https://clawd.rip
They're the least generous with open-source. The most closed off. The most likely to punish you for doing something they disagree with. Whenever OpenAI has issues they reset Codex's rate limits, they've done this every month that I can remember, and sometimes several weeks in a month. When's the last time Anthropic has done that for the many service issues they have had? Never. Not once.
Anthropic also never reply to peoples complaints or issues on GH issues, meanwhile the Codex team is very responsive and they actually care about customers user experience.
There's more, but you get the point. And yes, obviously not all of this is about Dario himself, but he drives the culture at the company.
Yes I'm surprised most of the "anthropic stans" don't realize this.
It's not like OpenAI is a particular fan of open-source models either, but the way I see it to OpenAI it's a purely calculated pragmatic business decision. They won't release weights for any good models since it'd impact revenue, and they view other open models as competition. But otherwise they're not ideological about it. If there was some really good reason to, they would (and they have, gpt-oss probably as a fig leaf). Sure some of the characterizations of "sama" aren't particularly flattering, but at the same time I think the common thread that he views everything as "just ruthless business" is ultimately beneficial, since rational and pragmatic can be modeled and understood.
Anthropic's founding philosophy is built on the premise that only they should control AI because of its danger, only they can be the right stewards, and that open-source models are an existential risk. Oh and the fact that it's Chinese open-source models rather than western models that are "winning" must be keeping them up at night.