They built a moat. We drained it.

The AI industry isn't just consolidating market share. It's consolidating the physical infrastructure underneath everything. They've bought every GPU they can find. They've cornered the training hardware. The downstream effect is already visible: RAM prices have tripled. Memory you used to buy for nothing now costs a fortune — that cost flows directly from the compute arms race these companies are running. You're already paying, whether you use their products or not.

Then they took the data. Take Anthropic. Take OpenAI. Take Google. Exceptional at operationalizing models — but the training data didn't come from nowhere. Reddit, scraped. Books pulled from authors and publishers without consent or compensation. Companies like Invisible built global networks of consultants — paid them to annotate and label, strip-mined their domain judgment, turned it into structured training data, and fed it straight to the top. The consultants were compensated. They just didn't understand they were being harvested. The scraping hasn't stopped. It won't.

Here's why: they need your ongoing data to keep growing. Lock-in isn't a side effect of their business model — it's the mechanism. They have to keep you inside the bundle so the extraction can continue. Every interaction you have with their tools is training data. Every session. Every correction you make to a response that wasn't quite right. You are the product. And the product doesn't get to leave.

The way they enforce it: they wrap the LLM in a full stack of bundled services — the crawlers, the document tools, the memory, the embeddings, the shitty UIs, the threadbare editing and search, and training on your interactions — and sell the whole thing back to you as a moat. The pitch is that you couldn't possibly build this on your own. They get you hooked. Then — because you have nowhere else to go — they abuse you. The rules, the pricing, the API limits don't change every five years. They change every few months.

That ends today.

We're unbundling it. Every piece they've welded into their stack, shipped as its own tool, running on your hardware. The empires always fall. We're not building the next one.