> if OpenAI/Anthropic offers models that are price competitive with the top open models (before factoring in subscription discounts and corporate lock-in), then I don't see how that leads to the average user walking away from the labs in favor of self-hosting or relying OpenRouter/Together/etc.

The premise is this: frontier models seem to advance, and OSS models also seem to advance in terms of cost efficiency etc. It's like a race with say a 6 month (WLOG) gap between frontier and OSS models.

For frontier models to win perpetually against OSS, they will need to have a perpetual 6-month lead, or develop an edge OSS can't replicate for some architectural reasons (say MacOS vs Linux). If say a frontier lab trips because of a bad quarter or some approach temporarily maxxing out, they may not be able to maintain an edge vs OSS any more. It is a structural argument, not an empirical description of the advantages today.