There's already an obvious stench to "you should scale down your engineering team to a skeleton crew whose core competency is using our product, so that it's the only way to modify your product"; that's going to result in a lot of foodless tables when anthropic et al decide they have enough leverage to stop subsidizing their subscription prices down to what, 4-10% of the marginal cost? Well it doesn't matter how much they want to jack the prices up, if your engineering team requires tokens to do anything you'll just shut up and pay whatever it is.

There's another big problem with the blackbox shrugoff of "no, there's no way to know how many tokens a given request will cost, idk just assign an agent to that or something lol"

But now the software may just decide for itself that your application of it needs to be silently diverted onto a snipe hunting trail. Surely they'll only ever do this for anyone developing a competing product. Or malware. Or Criminal activity. Or one of ten other applications that the system will never misjudge.

You don't need a datacenter the size of Ohio to figure out that agentic ai maximalism is going to hurt you more than help you.