alt Hacker NewsMore than killer AI I'm afraid of Anthropic/OpenAI going into full rent-seeking mode so that everyone working in tech is forced to fork out loads of money just to stay competitive on the market. These companies can also choose to give exclusive access to hand picked individuals and cut everyone else off and there would be nothing to stop them.
This is already happening to some degree, GPT 5.3 Codex's security capabilities were given exclusively to those who were approved for a "Trusted Access" programme.
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Well don’t forget we still have competition. Were anthropic to rent seek OpenAI would undercut them. Were OpenAI and anthropic to collude that would be illegal. For anthropic to capture the entire coding agent market and THEN rent seek, these days it’s never been easier to raise $1B and start a competing lab
but you are assuming that the magical wizards are the only ones who can create powerful AIs... mind you these people have been born just few decades ago. Their knowledge will be transferred and it will only take a few more decades until anyone can train powerful AIs ... you can only sit on tech for so long before everyone knows how to do it
With Gemma-4 open and running on laptops and phones I see the flip side. How many non-HN users or researchers even need Opus 4.6e level performance? OpenAI, Anthropric and Google may be “rent seeking” from large corporations — like the Oracles and IBMs.
The thing is that the current models can ALREADY replicate most software-based products and services on the market. The open source models are not far behind. At a certain point I'm not sure it matters if the frontier models can do faster and better. I see how they're useful for really complex and cutting edge use cases, but that's not what most people are using them for.
Describing providing a highly valuable service for money as `rent seeking` is pretty wild.