There's nothing wrong with having an ideology or having a set of values that the big AI labs are bad for the world and you don't want to support them, etc.

But in this case it seems like it's led your reasoning astray into this perspective where a small open weight model you can run on cheap hardware is just as good as the value you get from paying $200 to Anthropic. The reality is that it's not even close, at least for some people's use cases.

I really doubt I'll ever need to use local models, even in a scenario where the big labs stop doing subscriptions (unlikely), I could just pay API rates for the open weight models through OpenRouter, or just pay for API rates for Sonnet 5.5 or GPT 6.1 Sol, and adjust my workflows a bit. Still worth it.

I don't know, there are a LOT of things I worry about with AI, but what I'm going to do when the big labs drop subscriptions isn't even in my top 10. Probably not my top 20. Just a non-factor.