A model isn't a moat.

Intelligence is easy to replicate.
You can download weights, fork architectures, and fine-tune forever.

But you can’t deploy that intelligence at scale if someone else controls inference: pricing, quotas, KYC, regions, and policy switches that change overnight.

As AI moves from chatbots to agents, that gate becomes the choke point.

Who can run, when, at what latency, on which hardware, under whose rules.... and what happens when you get throttled from 200ms to 2 seconds.

Models will keep improving.
Rails decide which models find users.

Whoever controls inference access doesn’t just shape products.

They shape reality.