It's more about not spooking investors. If it's known that your AI is being used to reverse engineer software from well off corporations. They're going to be a little less likely to invest if 1: They're connected to any of those corporations 2: They're concerned about future lawsuits heading their way.

And of course the actual fear of potential lawsuits landing on their door, or being named in lawsuits against people using their AI to do this.

Yes, if you want control over AI you MUST host it yourself in reality.

This is where they’re gonna make things less secure as far as national security - foreign local models won’t have these restrictions for obvious reasons, so people will gladly install those and ignore crippled domestic options.

They are the way to go, but hardware pricing makes it cost-prohibitive to match frontier capabilities, which makes decomp and recomp difficult. Or rather, they require more skill and take longer, introducing some barriers against the current floodgates being flung open.

We all know the eye-watering prices GPUs and RAM cost now, to say nothing of Unified Memory devices like the Strix. Most people just don't have a spare $10K to throw at an inference box that can run (say) a 300B model at interactive (not batch) speeds.

Coming at this from another angle tho, I note that according to Steam stats, the most popular consumer GPUs are in the 8GB and 16GB range...which is smack bang in the VRAM range of what a good MoE (say, Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B) runs on (for 8GB) or arguably the best local dense coder (Qwen 3.8 27B) can live at. Which leaves us with a capable assistant and a capable coder.

I think there's probably room for LLM improvement in the 8–16GB range too...and given that most consumer PCs and laptops live there, I'm sanguine the open-weight devs might make it happen.

But I also suspect the gatekeeping of high-end capacities is intentional.

We're probably not going to have the ability to vibe code Mario into Elden Ring again...not without significantly more skill. Dunno.

Uhm yeah good luck with running anything locally after hardware prices double again and again. Big tech needs to be stopped. There is no wiggling out of this just by being a smart customer.

They suck far too much at the moment.