That might be the only way, which is kind of sad, till they patch that loophole, if it's not already patched.

Might also be a startup idea: AGPL servers as a Service. Someone else runs it for you, you make requests against it.

That’s a pretty good question. And likely there won’t be a definitive answer until there’s a decision from court.

I think in these cases one should try to understand what the IPR holder had in mind when they picked AGPL and not for example GPL or Apache. Trying to find loopholes might just get you into trouble in future.

That’s the difference about the AGPL - you have to open source the things that call it too. Putting it in a microservice is literally the thing that AGPL was written to prevent you from doing to work around it