> How is using Claude over Llama benefitting corporations over workers?

I'm not sure why you took the very general statement about AI being corp-over-worker to mean paid models vs free models? The technology itself heavily favors corporations, because the resources needed to create and operate the technology is massive, and is largely not available to individuals. Most of the freely downloadable models (and certainly the most popular ones) were trained by corporations. And there are many more models that are not available to individuals, only to corps.

> I work with AI every day and sum total of my token spend across all providers is less than a single NVidia H100 card I'd have to buy (from a pretty big corporation!), at the very least, for comparable purpose?

You don't need an H100 to run SLMs. You don't need LLMs that require commercial-grade memory capacities.

> How are self-hosted LLMs not copying the work of millions without compensating them for it?

Most are, especially when they're training data is closed-source. The ones that have open-source training data tend not to contain infringed-upon copywritten data. There is a huge issue right now with ML models being falsely called "open source", when in fact the source material needed to recreate them is not even known, much less provided publicly, which is probably the cause of the confusion.

> How is the push for more productivity through better technology somehow bad?

It's not, inherently. In practice though, it almost always means that workers are expected to be additionally productive, without being additionally compensated.