The rules are being written for people with lawyers
I spent an evening this week reading the terms on the tools I use. The price was not the part that bothered me. The paperwork was. Licences, registrations, a record of what a model was asked and what it answered, somebody signing off that the whole thing is being done properly.
I do not object to the principle. If a machine can write code and answer questions about a client's business, somebody should be able to ask what went in and what came out. I object to the bill for it.
Following a rule properly costs money before it does anything else. It costs a lawyer to read it, a system to log it, and somebody's time to keep that log honest. Those costs land roughly the same on a large company as on one man with a laptop, so the same bill is small change for one and ruinous for the other. That is what a rule like this does, whatever the people drafting it had in mind. It sorts by what you can afford, not by how well you work.
In my own case that is the whole story. I am one person with a laptop, a couple of servers and a client list. I am never going to have a compliance department, and I am not going to price one into a small job. If a licence, a registration and an audit trail become the cost of using these tools for the work I get paid for, I will not pay it. I will turn that work down, or I will do it under somebody larger who can carry the paper while I do the job. The work is the same either way. The number of people doing it is smaller.
The part I keep coming back to is who ends up writing the rules. The argument is loud at the moment, and loud arguments get answered quickly, and the seats at that table go to whoever can afford the lawyer. That is not a plot. It is just where the chairs are. The rules that come out will carry the shape of whoever wrote them.
So I do what I can with my own hands. I keep my own notes on what I run and why, because a system nobody can explain is a system nobody can defend. I keep the unglamorous option working on hardware I can put a hand on. I read the licence before a client's business goes anywhere near the tool. And when somebody asks how I work, I answer honestly, because that explanation may be the only part of the stack still mine.