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Comment by schleck8 | Hacker News Reader

You've not seen how long it takes to switch an enterprise claude subscription to github copilot or vice versa with all the compliance and shareholders

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Not sure where you work but at ours we have api access to all of them and can freely switch.

At my job people discuss almost weekly what the best models are for various price/quality points, with our CTO in particular wanting us to make sure we're being cost-effective in terms of what we're using for a given task (his words are basically "I don't want you to use these tools less, I just want you to use them effectively")

I’ve seen enterprises have access to all the harnesses but not all the models within them

and they ask dumb followup questions after 7 business days when you want different access

No DLP concerns?

I think they have zero data retention contracts with all of them.

Yes, they'll throw it out after they trained on it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

they don't retain the data! just the features

A lot of places already subscribe to both. Indeed, in large enterprises it isn’t uncommon to simultaneously subscribe to Copilot, Claude, OpenAI, Cursor, AWS Bedrock, Gemini, etc — you might subscribe to different ones for different teams/projects/employees/etc, but often the approval by legal/IT/etc is generic not scoped to whoever is using it right now

If you are charged based on usage, you can “soft switch” between them really quickly.

A lot of places just pay the token cost of the usage, so they sign up to all of them and lets the winner win.

Amen. My employer recently switched Cursor -> Claude, and the whole thing stalled out for around 3 weeks while a BAA (Business Associate Agreement, required for HIPAA compliance) was negotiated and signed.

3 weeks sounds amazing in corporate time

That's pretty much all enterprise software though, it's pretty much how Microsoft stays in business, and even then if the question of switching is even humoured (the idea of a big company switching away from Office would be inconceivable to many), that'd imply its not sticky enough

Lol at my $job we have one token quota which can be used with all the frontier models.

Comes to something then OpenAI’s best hope is to essentially become the next Oracle.

What’s that make oracle?

I know several people working at UHC that have access to the big 3 providers and switch between them freely, both agentic and in-editor AI.

They even negotiate with all three aggressively.

So not really.

We built our harness around swapping endpoints on demand. We can send to one model, many models, cloud or on prem infra. Certainly, not everyone has, but this is the future imho.

copilot is not the best example as it's a bit like openrouter for enterprises.

isn't that a problem for large enterprises?

It's a problem for the security, legal, and IT teams, but not that much for developers, unless they get really particular about their harness. On the other hand, these are the high dollar value accounts that providers want to keep; but if there's no reason to avoid switching, this market really will feel like a utility market (i.e. it'll be like switching ISPs or cell phone providers - annoying but fungible).

The AI companies want to differentiate and become something more than a commodity, even if it's as critical as a utility is.

Enterprises tend to be your largest customers. Especially when current stock values for tech companies are majority predicated on AI becoming a staple in everyday life.

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