If it's the case then software engineers still have the same place as pre-ClaudeCode era, because 4.8 and 5.5 are damn good at algo but notoriously bad at architecture and coordination.
Thousands of American engineers all over the country (most of whom probably aren't on Hacker News) work with ITAR/EAR-regulated software and hardware every single day: these regulations are really not difficult to abide if you're a citizen.
Except it isn't zero-sum thinking: the rest of the world can have the scraps, and as long as the scraps are marginally better than the rest of the world's offerings, they will sell.
> What are they going to do? Start their own Anthropic? Go for it. Why is every other country in the world entitled to American technology by default?
Because American tech companies make a lot of money from outside of the US. For instance, 1/4 of all Apple revenues are from Europe, and 1/5 from China and China-claimed territories. Only around 40% are from the Americas (so not even the US exclusively).
Would American tech companies be as successfull without ~half their revenues?
In any case, it doesn't matter, the cat is out of the bag. Nobody sane and non-American would trust American frontier labs, because their models can be yanked at will by whoever is in the White House. It would be suicidal to rely on them for critical business or developer workflows. So your options are to go with Mistral or open source Chinese models, hosted within your environment, with the added benefits of being able to control the costs and being able to fine tune the models to better work for you.
I'm referring to OpenAI and Antropic - would they be successfull with ~40-50% of their potential market?
And iPhones, not really. But you can bet your ass that every business purchasing software in Europe is at least considering the geopolitical risks of buying American, and thinking of alternatives. Doesn't mean they'll all stop buying American software any time soon, but the shift has already started.