AI Labs Stop Selling Commodity Models to Everyone
Source: Big Technology
Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are beginning to restrict API access to their most capable models, moving away from the "sell to all comers" licensing model that defined the industry's first wave. When a model is genuinely differentiated and enables transformative applications—search, autonomous agents, enterprise decision-making—the labs capture more value by building products around it themselves rather than licensing it to competitors. The API-as-utility model is shifting toward a platform model, mirroring how Amazon Web Services evolved. That matters for the thousands of startups built on the assumption that foundational AI would remain openly available infrastructure.