[AOsborn]

I mean you're not wrong about the rug pull scenario, and you're specifically increasing reliance on one monolithic company.

That said, you have exactly the same category of risk with hiring an employee or team. They could leave at any point also. You always have the option to contract in handcuffs or a notice period, but then the same applies to the AI tooling as well.

In the same way this can't end up much worse than cloud vendor lock-in either. Many businesses dream or discuss about being 'cloud agnostic' but realistically most are tightly coupled, especially around cost-of-change and institutional knowledge.

[atleta]

It's absolutely not the same ball park of risk. First of all, once you have a reasonable business, you'll have a number of employees (and multiple teams). And teams are unlikely to stand up at once, not to mention all your employees leaving at once. I mean unless something is seriously wrong with the company, of course.

That's one thing. The other thing is that employees who leave only hamper future development not the current business/operation. (Again, unless a large number of employees leave in a short time, which means you have screwed up something.) Once you have a stable organization, you can replace individual employees at a reasonable rate without serious issues. (You actually have to prepare for this as employees will leave, no matter what.)

The big difference with cloud providers is that they really offer something that's complementary and not something that can easily be turned into your product. (I mean except for the SaaS companies that really just repackage the cloud offer into an easier to use product. They are definitely at risk all the time.)