The intelligence loan: frontier labs subsidize your access and repay themselves by distilling your edge
cjmaddison · x · 2026-09-18
cjmaddison offers a framework for frontier lab pricing: what users pay doesn't cover training and serving costs, yet labs consider it worth it — because the exchange has a hidden second half.
The logic:
- Labs lend you today's best intelligence at a subsidized price.
- The real repayment is your intelligence, revealed through interactions, preferences and IP, which gets distilled into a better future model served at scale to everyone.
- Conclusion: it's an intelligence loan — borrow the world's intelligence today, lose exclusive access tomorrow to the intelligence that made you unique.
A cautionary lens on the moat problem for heavy users of frontier models.
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