Talking with founders in Silicon Valley lately, I’ve noticed a quiet resentment building toward Anthropic. Many are losing trust in a model company they once leaned on heavily, because it keeps shipping products that compete head-on with its own partners. Figma is the clearest case: the two were still partners at the start of this year, and by April Anthropic had launched a design tool going directly against them. And Anthropic isn’t the only one. Last month OpenAI released its “super app,” ChatGPT Work, folding several separately paid tools into a single product. The partner giving you a lift yesterday is your competitor today.
“Sovereignty” may be the most valuable thing in the AI era — and the most easily surrendered. Figma at least owns its technology and its customers; it took a punch, but it can still punch back. The ones really losing sleep are the companies built entirely on top of someone else’s model. For them the model is the lifeline: one price hike, or one lookalike product, and they may have to shut the doors.
From these conversations, I’ve come to see that this kind of deep entanglement happens one step at a time. First you adopt the platform’s model. Then you wire in your data and your workflows, layer by layer. Eventually the product experience itself has grown roots in it, and pulling free means digging up the soil along with them. In the beginning, AI feels like a pair of wings — everything moves faster. But once you’re bound tightly enough, the day you want to switch, you discover it’s no longer a matter of changing a line of code. In the worst case, you have to tear down half the product. Those wings, without anyone noticing, have become handcuffs.
Lately, people have started taking this seriously. Some have moved to open-source models and built stacks they fully control. Others are pulling their most important data back in-house, because they understand that whatever you hand over easily today may well be raising your competitor tomorrow.
Perhaps this is a collective awakening now underway in Silicon Valley: founders rethinking the balance between borrowed power and independence. Foundation models remain extraordinarily efficient leverage — but making sure that lever stays in your own hands is becoming something every founder has to settle before typing the first line of code.
