Should they pay for their pipelines too?

After all, they should know how to compile their software. Any automation of that process is cheating their employer.

Sure. Should I also pay rent for my desk at the office?

You're opening yourself up to data right and privacy risks with that. My company demands that I use their enterprise account because they can claim full ownership of all produced output and have full logs of every interaction.

I think that gets legally murky, if the employee is the one who pays for the tool.

The forklift should just be paid for by the employee. After all they should be strong enough to do work without one.

I don't understand your logic, why would an employee pay for a tool their employer wants them to use?

If my employer is not forcing me to use a tool and gives me freedom, I'll be perfectly OK to use my own tools which I bought with my own money.

If my employer is putting scoreboards to see and champion who uses a tool which costs money to use, they shall pay for the tool.

Sorry, I'm not a ladder climber, yet I'm not mindless enough to bankrupt myself.

I could still do my job by typing all code into notepad, but companies don't charge employees for their IDE usage for a reason.

Nah. Work provides the tools.

An LLM is not too dissimilar to a Work Laptop or an IDE license.

I am fine with that if I can keep the time saved for my personal use.

I’d love it if I could bring my own computer to do my work, rather than be stuck with garbage hardware because of an enterprise agreement.

As someone who does have to pay for my own AI tools (if I didn't use OpenCode's free models), I agree.

Employer pays tools used for work. Whether they are used to speed up work or to make it possible.

"employees should foot the bill for tools that directly benefit their billion dollar employers"

In California this would mean the employee would own the IP -- or at least it would be murky -- and companies and lawyers don't like murky.