This was the exact moment Zuckerberg realized that he will be a massive winner in the AI race OpenAI and Anthropic were desperately asking for regulation because tokens are being commoditized by open source alternatives The only option for them was to keep reducing token costs to compete. The only problem? They already made commitments for hundreds of billions in capex. At a certain price, the return on capital simply doesn’t make any sense So they came to the realization that the only way to sustain their trillion dollar valuations was to either: 1. Become entrenched through regulation by preventing other models from gaining share 2. Fight up market and become vertically integrated by building platforms in the application layer The second one is where Zuckerberg has a massive advantage vs both of the frontier model companies He already has a massive user base with nearly a third of the entire world as monthly active users He already has multiple platforms that are cash cows for his business, that also require very little capital investment each year Meta could stop spending on their family of apps tomorrow and these platforms would still generate billions of free cash flow each year In essence, he can subsidize losses on any AI platform, such as Muse, longer than any of his competitors can This gives him time to simply just bleed out Anthropic and OpenAI, especially when it comes to the consumer facing application layer of AI Trump refusing to give in to Dario and Sam’s requests is a massive win for Meta and Zuckerberg. That is why he can’t hold his smile here