Christopher Mims, a Wall Street Journal technology columnist, argues AI is becoming a cheap commodity, benefiting China and rivals more than IPO-bound leaders OpenAI and Anthropic. ChatGPT’s global consumer share slipped below 50% by March per Sensor Tower as Gemini and Claude gained, while Chinese models hold the top five spots on the OpenRouter leaderboard and carry roughly 45% of its tracked tokens. Xi Jinping used a Shanghai speech to back open-weights models against U.S. AI dominance, and Meta, SpaceXAI, and free releases like Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab have effectively started the price war the two labs are now weighing. Mims says both need new moats, likely cheap power, as OpenAI diversifies with hardware and 3M-plus business customers and Anthropic, off its first profitable quarter, files to IPO as soon as this fall.
