Google can definitely play a spoiler role here not only due to their compute infrastructure and ability to play the long-game financially but they also have more existing ways to monetize with their other businesses.

The ideal pro-consumer scenario is OAI and Anthropic are prevented from extracting monopoly rents between 'close-enough' self/cloud-hosted open source on one side and Google on the other. I'm really hoping that's how it plays out. Of course that will be somewhere between bad and disastrous for all the VCs and hedge-funds who financed the mad AI build-out far in advance of demand, and then kept funding it as prices went vertical.

However, I'm shedding no tears for them as I look forward to the fire sales when all the GPUs and RAM they pre-bought flood back onto the spot market. :-)