The gap between closed and open stops being a gap and becomes a duration. Zhipu’s GLM-4.7 tops GPT-5.2 on WebDev Arena and breaks 73% on SWE-bench while trailing the closed frontier by about half a year; Epoch puts the FrontierMath lag at roughly seven months. A monopoly measured in months is a schedule, not a moat.
Against that, the price of agency is rising even as the price of reasoning falls — the hourly cost at the METR autonomy horizon is going up.