When the model takes away the moat

There has been an explosion of AI-powered products released over the past four years, with most built on top of leading foundation models. Startups, enterprise software vendors, and even large incumbents route their core intelligence through APIs from the leading AI labs, and a growing but still narrow set of open-weight alternatives.

CEO and co-founder of Boltzbit.

This arrangement has most certainly enabled a genuine burst of AI products, but it has also created a structural fragility which can be…