It would seem strange, if they were operating in the same economy, but they don't. DeepSeek operates in an economy with a high degree of central planning.
China subsidizes strategic industries, and they have heavily done so with AI. And DeepSeek specifically has said they have no commercialization plans.
For example: https://www.boc.cn/aboutboc/bi1/202501/t20250123_25254674.ht...
DeepSeek is not the only provider of inference for their models. Chinese subsidies likely do explain DeepSeek's ability to provide inference cheaper than other providers, but even a US provider like DeepInfra can serve DeepSeek 4 Pro at $1.30/M in and $2.60/M out. Unless American labs are doing something wildly inefficient, it feels safe to assume Anthropic has some profit margin on inference at API prices.
They may, neglecting overhead R&D. But also, some suspect that US models are significantly heavier than DeepSeek in resource consumption by multiple measures
It’s generally established that Anthropic/OpenAI are going for all out performance with big VC dollars at the expense of efficiency and China has geopolitically limited compute and an inventive to compete on value per dollar.