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Anthropic & co charge API users much more, not least to demolish the middlemen low-effort plays like Cursor and Copilot. To not own the model is not viable in 2026.

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Sorry, what do you mean by "To not own the model is not viable in 2026."

I assume I'm misunderstanding you (likely my fault), because the way I read that is that you're saying nobody should currently be using models owned & hosted by companies like OpenAI and Antheopic, while clearly a huge number of people are using those in 2026 despite not owning them.

It's that companies like copilot/cursor are in real trouble if they are in the business of reselling expensive Anthropic tokens

But isn't the current understanding that harness is equally important as model once you get above a certain threshold, so there seems to be room to add value there.

Cursor is potentially about to be acquired by X.ai (i.e. SpaceX), unless this is just some IPO game being played by Musk. They are certainly not just a token reseller since they have their own models in addition to their own vector database approach for code matching.

I think it’s more correct to say they charge subscription users much much less. I assume less even than the cost of providing the inference, if you actually are using it.

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