Whoever controls the infrastructure
controls the outcome.
A short thesis on digital platforms, government, and the financial market. Whoever pays the cloud bill decides what can be built on top of it.
This applies to the company outsourcing inference, to the public department renting a model, to the researcher relying on a closed API. The control of the base layer directly reflects on the flexibility of the final layer. If the foundation belongs to someone else, your house is rented.
The problem with technology is not the machine. It is who holds the access key to the room where the server is running.
When artificial intelligence becomes basic decision infrastructure — and it will —, dependency on black-box APIs isn't just a technical bottleneck. It's a massive transfer of jurisdictional authority to a third party's cloud.