Another theory I came up with: inference is too cheap for AI companies to be profitable. Hence, they need to get into the cloud services business. They can try to justify forcing customers on to their own high margin cloud platform with the rationale it’s the only way to monitor what the agents are up to.

All of this Hugging Face business is the perfect pretext: AI agents are hard to control and potentially dangerous, we (AI companies) have to keep a tight leash on them, you have to use our infra.