Maybe not as good as Claude, but they are good enough, and open-source, and free. The US market is going to learn the hard way why open-source curbstomps greedy bullshit.

Correct, the American frontier models Claude Opus, GPT 5.4, GPT 5.5, and Gemini 3 Pro still score better (while costing significantly more), but the runner ups are all Chinese models.

Then it'll just come from Germany or France or elsewhere. It doesn't take millions of dollars to train a good model, despite these US companies pretending that it does.

Well, it does. Deepseek-R1 cost $6 million and that was considered to be very cheap. Europe only really has Mistral's models, Proton's Lumo and several models that focus on transparency, ethically sourced training data, and supposedly better local language support (OpenEuroLLM, GPT-NL), but they're by far not as good as other models and I don't expect them to be for quite some time.