I'm not really in that camp, but I'm still in the camp of "will they survive long-term if good enough open models trickles down to commodity hardware" (in a way the opposite camp perhaps?).
Sun made bank 25 years ago because their servers was needed for websites, today we run larger workloads on 5$ VPS servers (well maybe the VPS servers has gotten more expensive due to HW shortages but they're not intrinsically expensive anymore).
Think they're going to be like Oracle. Databases were a valuable thing when they were new but became free with postgres. Like Oracle Anthropic et al will move up the value chain.
Switching cost for a DB and switching cost for an inference API are very different things. They’re going to have to create lock-in with something other than model intelligence if they want to play Oracle’s games.
Vendor lock-in is inevitable when negotiating enterprise contracts. Companies will sign one or two-year deals based on headcount, convinced they're going to save a ton of money. And a big part of the appeal will probably come from intelligence capabilities being bundled with services they're already paying for (looking at you Microsoft)
Its nothing like Oracle - for long time there was Oracle and nothing so the army of mostly politically influenced salesman/lobbyist who convinced local councilman its better to spend $250,000 on Oracle license, continue to this days because migration also comes with risk and cost. Here you have Chinese models popping out less than 24 hours later, and they are of similar quality at fraction of cost. Its totally different world that what it was in 80s.