> Why rent the model to build a profitable company with when you could just take all that profit for yourself?

You're describing a standoff at best and a horrible parasitic relationship at worst.

In the worst case, the supplier starves the customer of any profit motive and the customer just stops and the supplier then has no business to run.

This has happened a few times in the past and is by 2026, well understood as a way to bankruptcy.

That has always been the beauty of free markets - it's self healing and calibrating. You don't need a big powerful overseer to ensure things are right.

Competing with customers is a way to lose business fast.

For example:

- AWS has everything they need to shit out products left, right and center. AWS can beat most of their partners and even customers who are wiring together all their various products tomorrow if they wanted. They don't because killing an entire vertical isn't of any benefit to them yet. Eventually they will when AWS is no longer growing and cannot build or scale any product no matter how hard they think or try. Competing with their customers is their very last option.

- OpenAI/Anthropic/Google isn't going to start competing against the large software body shops. Even if all that every employee at TCS does is hit Claude up, Anthropic isn't going to be the next TCS - it's competing with their customers.