Makes sense. A lot of people I have seen that use chinese models, just download it and host it on US or their country's infra, so no money goes to alibaba. If they are OK with API access, they just use anthropic or openai. This move will basically cut that tap and make it so if you want the cheaper chinese models, you have to pay deepseek or alibaba themselves.
I said this was happening months ago but no one listened.