Comment by 0xbadcafebee

Depends on what you mean by 'bang for buck'. The open weights aren't better than openai/claude. But they are much cheaper and the limits are much higher, so you get more work out of it for less money. Every subscription provider out there provides better money-per-limit value than Anthropic (other than GitHub, who are by far the most embarrassingly overpriced and limited provider). (https://codeberg.org/mutablecc/calculate-ai-cost/src/branch/...)

> I’m still apprehensive about shipping all my stuff off to a lab under an adversarial government (to the US)

Do you mean you don't want to use the models created by a non-US lab? In that case, yes you're stuck with US models, but there's a half dozen big labs in the US. If you meant just where your inference is done, there are providers in 12 different countries through OpenRouter, including the US. Several subscription providers host in multiple countries. There's a lot of choices.