Anthropic & co charge API users much more, not least to demolish the middlemen low-effort plays like Cursor and Copilot. To not own the model is not viable in 2026.

I think it’s more correct to say they charge subscription users much much less. I assume less even than the cost of providing the inference, if you actually are using it.

Sorry, what do you mean by "To not own the model is not viable in 2026."

I assume I'm misunderstanding you (likely my fault), because the way I read that is that you're saying nobody should currently be using models owned & hosted by companies like OpenAI and Antheopic, while clearly a huge number of people are using those in 2026 despite not owning them.