A small group of companies is currently generating enormous, non-recurring revenue by selling training data, expert judgment, simulated environments, evaluations, and physical capture to frontier AI labs. Some are closing tens of millions in purchase orders per month with teams of fewer than a dozen people. The cash is real. The contracts are not forever.

What is actually being sold falls into six categories: hours of labeling (already dying), high-end expert judgment, simulated worlds for agents to practice in, benchmarks and red-teaming (the referees), physical sensor data from real workers, and licensed rights to existing corpora. Almost everything arrives as a one-time purchase order against a deliverable. Nothing renews by default.

Frontier AI labs are not competing on the same playing field. Each has a unique identity that creates its own structural bottleneck.

OpenAI serves over 900 million monthly active users, mostly consumers. This produces a severe usage-mix problem: high volume of low-value prompts drives enormous inference costs with low revenue per token.