Your model provider may also become your consulting competitor.
The move by frontier labs into enterprise services changes the platform risk for companies building on top of them.
I have seen this pattern in other platform markets. First, the platform sells infrastructure. Then it sees which workflows customers actually pay for. Then it starts offering more of that workflow directly.
The AI version is becoming visible now. If a lab supplies the model, sells enterprise access, and sends services teams into the same accounts, the startup building on that API has to be honest about where its moat really is. It cannot just be "we use the best model." It has to be workflow ownership, domain expertise, proprietary context, integration depth, distribution, or operational trust.
This does not mean every AI company gets crushed. It means the dependency map has changed.
The API is a supplier relationship. The services arm can quietly turn it into a channel conflict.