Exactly! The thing that squeezes out new entrants isn't only the compliance cost, it's that your whole roadmap ends up resting on access you don't control.

We already saw the terms moved under us once with Fable, the retention policy changed and some requests started routing to a weaker model, none of us small operators had any say in that. Now access itself is a government decisions.

For anyone building on top of these APIs that's the real barrier, not the rule-following overhead but the fact that the ground can shift mid-flight and you can't negotiate with whoever's moving it.

Which is exactly why open weights start looking less like ideology and more like risk management.