If the concern is about the inference cost -- we do have open-weight models that are getting more powerful, and hardware to run small-ish models cheap. I run agents using small local models in my MacBook.
On my Macbook M1 Pro I can run the gpt-oss-20b model without issues and quite fast.
what exactly are the "politics" of using DeepSeek? Feels weird to single out DeepSeek like that
For example, OpenAI's charter is "to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity". They go on to list more specific political goals downstream from that: https://openai.com/charter/
Of course!
That said Qwen3 and Qwen3 Coder are both pretty nice. Also ERNIE 4.5 if the benchmarks are to be trusted but I mostly run Ollama instead of vLLM now so can’t test it out atm (apparently llama.cpp added support for them recently though).
The models by Mistral might also be worth a look and personally I thought the EuroLLM project was also nice, but MoE models feel way more palatable on limited hardware.
Neither seem to be able to directly compete with Sonnet 4 or Gemini 2.5 Pro, would need way better hardware to come close.