Except enterprises aren't funding it with API usage either.

These businesses lose unbelievably large amounts of investor money. Their AI-related revenues don't get even close to paying for their AI-related outlays.

End user (invididual, small business, large business) clients are still complicit not because they are funding it, but because they are signalling to investors that this is something people/businesses want.

Nobody gets off the hook here. It is every bit as much end user nihilism as it is AI company nihilism.

Your end users are divided into multiple categories though.

AI spending is a bit like Pokemon games - most of your players are free to play, only earning you traffic and maybe some more players after recommending it to their friends - that's the average AI user. Around 5-10% of players pay a bit to the game - maybe to unlock some extra characters - those are the $20-$200 AI subscription users, with these you are not going to fund the whole business but it's some side cash. Then you have the 1℅, which spend massive amounts of money onto the game, and those are the ones primarily funding it - that's the business spending and where most of the money actually comes from.

You can only blame the average person for using the cloud service and recommending it to others.

>End user (invididual, small business, large business) clients are ... complicit ... because they are signalling to investors that this is something people/businesses want

Erm, you appear to have missed the last 100+ years of updates to Western Capitalism.

People don't want it, you make the demand with hundreds of millions of spend on advertising (brainwashing), influencers, and social proof.

The capital holders don't sit back and see which company wins so capital can be directed to the best solutions, they buy up the competition, they pay corrupt politicians, they use current v market placement to embed their products name into billions of workplace computers and spread stories about how it's going to 'increase productivity but never at the cost of jobs', etc.

Yes, ultimately a dollar is a vote, but I don't think you can blame the people being manipulated "every bit as much" as those controlling the manipulation to feed their avarice and/or megalomania.

I think we know today that blaming everyone and their plant doesn’t actually solve the problem. The formula that does is: find the ultimate beneficiaries (shareholders) and make them lose a lot of money to, then their delegates (CEOs) and punish them with jail time. There are lots of opinions about this, but I don’t see how this does not work.