Samuel Colvin (새뮤얼 콜빈), CEO of AI development framework Pydantic, said Anthropic and OpenAI's AI coding strategies aim to lock in customers.

According to a recent Business Insider report, Colvin said, "It is clear why Claude Code and Codex include several thousand dollars' worth of inference costs in a $200 monthly subscription. It is to secure market share as quickly as possible."

He said that with both companies pursuing IPOs, it is hard to secure profitability through a competition focused only on model quality, so they are trying to tie down customers in ways unrelated to the model.

Colvin pointed in particular to codebase lock-in. He said, "If AI generates large-scale code, it becomes impossible for humans to maintain it directly. In the end, you have no choice but to keep using the same AI coding service, and once usage becomes entrenched, they will raise prices," he said.

Colvin said he expects Anthropic and OpenAI to soon release a service that stores the entire conversation record of the code-writing process, or trajectory. He said this would allow users to later look up the intent behind why code was written in a certain way, making bug fixes and maintenance easier. "At first they will offer it for free, but make it impossible to export," Colvin said. "Then an entire company becomes completely dependent on a specific AI coding service," he said.

Pydantic is one of the widely used frameworks in AI development, and it recently raised $12.5 million in funding led by Sequoia Capital.