Third-party calls won't eat into Apple's compute, so it's not entirely against the interests of Apple as they put caps on people's AI use.
I wonder what the margin on this stuff is for them:
Some Apple Intelligence features in the Home app, such as
video summaries, are available for a limited number of
cameras depending on your iCloud+ plan — up to 1 camera
in the 2 TB plan, up to 2 cameras in the 6 TB plan, and
up to 5 cameras in the 12 TB plan. Supported camera
counts and other iCloud+ plan features may change over time.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/127901
Quite annoying that you need to get the top plan for 5 cameras, and you cannot get more.
I like tinkering with this stuff, everything around me is a perpetual lab, so I have more than 5 cameras that I'd like to hook up to this. But I REALLY don't NEED or WANT 12TB or storage.
I want all of these integrations to be possible locally, without having to send my data to the cloud.
But I cannot. A lot of these nice integrations aren't offered for fully-local setups.