Markets
Analysis
The Quiet Collapse of the LLM Moat
Frontier labs spent four years building defensible advantages. A single open-weights release rewrote that thesis in a weekend.
By The Memo · Friday, June 19, 2026 · 10 min read
For most of 2024 and 2025, the conventional wisdom inside the frontier labs was simple: scale wins, and only a handful of companies can afford to scale. Capex was the moat. Training data was the moat. Distribution through hyperscalers was the moat. Everyone agreed.
Subscribers only
Keep reading — it's free.
The Model Memo is a free daily newsletter. Drop your email to unlock the rest of this essay and get tomorrow's in your inbox. Always free, unsubscribe anytime.
Free daily newsletter. Unsubscribe anytime. No spam — ever.
Keep Reading
