The extensions system presented at Apple's conference allowed iPhone users, for the first time, to choose between models from different vendors, including an Anthropic model as an option.
Letting the user choose the vendor is a product decision with large market effects. It turns the model into a replaceable component inside the device, and replaceable components compete on price and quality rather than position.
For vendors, the change is ambiguous. You gain distribution to an enormous audience with no acquisition cost, and you lose the direct relationship with the user, which becomes mediated by whoever controls the device.
For users, the gain is real and familiar from other categories: when the browser or the search engine can be swapped, the system maker has less incentive to let the default degrade.
The corporate side moved that way in the period too, with a cloud platform offering a catalogue of thousands of models, competitors included. In both cases, the model stopped being the product and became a part.