When you build your company's workflows around Claude Cowork, you are betting against local models and owning your infra, and inviting your company to long-term exploitation If I were Anthropic or OpenAI, I would be the most scared of local AI proliferating Let's do the math. A single large big lab subscription costs 200x12=$2400 per year If you want to have both OpenAI and Anthropic, that could cost $2400, $3600, or $4800, based on which combinations of Pro, Max plans you choose An ASUS Ascent GX10 costs $3000, and you can use that for many years. You don't get the same level of coding quality with open models yet, but maybe you want to do something simpler than coding today... There are already many people who started buying GPUs for this reason Now we know big labs are selling some of these plans at a loss. So they will likely get more expensive When you use Claude Cowork or similar, you are locking yourself into being a RENTER. Because once you set up workflows for a company, it takes time to migrate away to something else, even though we have AI to help Infra is sticky, it's how hyperscalers make profit. Think about the difference in amount you pay AWS vs Hetzner. This is B2B SaaS 101. Once you sell to a company, you are in for a long time, especially in Europe So if you build your company's AI workflows around a proprietary product by another company, then you are basically saying "Come exploit me as tolerably as you can in the next 10 years, because it will be too painful for me to switch" It's a great business for Anthropic. And Claude is awesome too! The feedback from friends who use it has been great, it made their lives a lot easier But when you build your company over proprietary AI infra, then you are making sure you will not be an OWNER, and partake in the usual sorrows of being a RENTER from a monopolist, which is exploitation This is not the case when you use open source agent infra. Whereas Anthropic is unlikely to let you use future open models in their future iteration of Claude Cowork, using free and open source frameworks like OpenClaw, Open Agents, etc. lets you drop in replace providers or local hardware if they start to upcharge you Keep this in mind, if you have a business