Regarding moats: it's been said by everyone else, but it doesn't seem like Anthropic has a moat. Everyone can easily switch from Claude to Codex, OpenCode, Pi, or any of the other zillions of harnesses. They can even have Claude do the migration for them if they want and it will oblige – that's what I did when I canceled my Claude subscription.
The idea that hardware and compute is their moat is interesting, but open/local models become more capable each week. As I write this, I have 3 instances of some no-name model working on 3 separate worktrees on my M1 Mac Studio. It was viable for me ages ago, and I'm not an AI enthusiast (I just happened to have bought a Mac several years ago that can run these models). I haven't paid Anthropic or OpenAI a cent since the early part of 2026.
But if you’re statisfied with just that throughput and model capability that a M1 can provide, than I don’t think you are a well monetizable client anyway? I agree with the no moat as I use a wide variety of models but to only use my M5 128 would definitely not statisfy my needs, so on top of that I pay.
loading story #50252270
I'm also local-only in my current development process, and have a couple local agents running right now. The problem with local right now is the price has gone through the roof. Even 3-6 months ago I would have said it's viable for a lot of people, but even getting the RAM for a local inference machine is a big investment for a lot of people trying to dip their toes into the space these days.