Expert takes Sep 1, 2026

This week · posted August 31

The venture investor Tomasz Tunguz: scarcity at the frontier has moved from price to permission.

Tomasz Tunguz has spent years writing SaaS and AI market analysis from public data. His August 31 piece lands on one line: "Access, not price, is the new scarcity at the frontier." Every receipt he lists is clickable. Salesforce picked Anthropic as its dedicated AI partner, making Claude the default model inside the world's largest customer relationship management system and inside Slack. OpenAI cut off API supply to the AI coding tool Cursor after SpaceX bought it, effective November 12, citing prior contract breaches. Even open weights now come with gates — the open-weight model provider Z.ai released GLM-5.3-Flash under a permissive MIT license on August 26, then put its flagship behind a threshold two days later: any model host with more than $10 billion of revenue across any twelve consecutive months has to pass a Z.ai security review before commercial use (the original, 08-31). Where it touches our own judgments: this is counter-pressure on item 1 of today's main line. If the first valve on usage is whether a model provider will let you in and how much allocation you get, then any elasticity reading derived from price alone is short one variable. ⚠️ This is trend commentary rather than new evidence; we read every receipt in it only as he cites them and followed none through to the original reporting, and the author is a venture investor, so a conclusion that access is getting expensive runs with his positions rather than against them.