You pay for AI twice. Once with money, and once with everything your company knows The second payment is something nobody prices in. Every prompt and correction your team feeds a frontier model carries proprietary knowledge upstream. How you price deals, how you handle the weird edge cases, what good looks like inside your org. A competitor couldn’t buy that knowledge at any price. The lab gets it as exhaust Social media at least had the decency to be free while it made you the product. The labs charge you millions for the same arrangement You pay for tokens, your usage trains the next model, your alpha ends up in the weights, and the weights get sold to everyone in your industry. You fund the R&D and your competitors buy the output The popular answer is to train your own model. I think that’s the 2026 version of every company needing its own blockchainn. You won’t outspend the labs on compute, and you don’t have to, because the model was never the asset. Models get swapped every six months anyway What doesn’t get swapped is your tacit knowledge. Your evals, your memory, the accumulated judgment that makes your company yours. That’s all leaking So rent the intelligence, own the learning loop, and draw a boundary the exhaust doesn’t cross without your consent In the cloud era companies accumulated data. In the AI era they accumulate learning The question is whether yours compounds inside your walls or someone else’s