Building a business entirely on a closed-source API from a major provider like Anthropic or OpenAI is precarious. These platform companies can and do release new capabilities that directly compete with and subsume the functionalities of startups in their ecosystem, effectively erasing their business overnight.

For an infrastructure business, the existential AI threat is not being replaced. It's having another company build the valuable "intelligence layer" on top of your platform, commoditizing your core service into a low-margin "dumb pipe."

AI companies built to fill feature gaps on top of foundation models are at high risk. As core models rapidly improve, they often absorb these adjacent features, disintermediating the "wrapper" companies. Their early-adopter customers are also the quickest to switch to better tools.

Large AI labs are actively building capabilities that will directly compete with and subsume the functions of specialized SaaS companies. As Sam Altman warned, if a SaaS product doesn't improve with each new model release, the generally capable base model will eventually replicate its features, making it obsolete.

Startups building on OpenAI or Anthropic APIs face a major platform risk. Their usage data trains the underlying foundational models, enabling the platform owners to eventually absorb their features natively and make the startups obsolete.

Widespread anxiety from founders before OpenAI's Developer Day highlights a key challenge for AI startups. The fear is not a new competitor, but that the underlying platform (OpenAI) will launch a feature that completely absorbs their product's functionality, making their business obsolete overnight.

While the urge to be an early adopter is strong, there's a significant risk in building AI features that may become obsolete or commoditized overnight. A new feature could be reduced to a simple 'skill' on a major AI platform, negating the development effort and investment.

Startups are becoming wary of building on OpenAI's platform due to the significant risk of OpenAI launching competing applications (e.g., Sora for video), rendering their products obsolete. This "platform risk" is pushing developers toward neutral providers like Anthropic or open-source models to protect their businesses.

Unlike traditional SaaS, AI applications have a unique vulnerability: a step-function improvement in an underlying model could render an app's entire workflow obsolete. What seems defensible today could become a native model feature tomorrow (the 'Jasper' risk).