The thing about not much difference between models and the harness making them deterministic and useful is wrong. Also models have different strengths and weaknesses and some are better at almost everything by a large margin compared to others.

As for your speculation, I think it's hinging on some companies releasing models for free or no big differences between models. In a world with hyperscalers and companies training models you can quickly recreate Anthropic or OpenAI by having an hyperscaler ally with a model training company, train a good/a better model, and not release it.