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One group is still chasing benchmark position. The other is compounding a private moat. They don't end in the same place.

Anthropic buys runway on the agent loop; OpenAI buys breadth across three SKUs. Same window, opposite bets — and it closes faster than either pricing page suggests.

Karp says rent the model, lose the alpha. Cognition's customers are closing loops on real work. Different bets, different compounding.

Frontier intelligence has a 4–6 month half-life; builders priced against scarcity are re-underwriting margins they set last quarter.

xAI compounds through tooling; Amazon reprices a bet that's cracking. The loop builders and the contract renegotiators don't end in the same place.