Always has been. Corporate's solution to every empowering technology is to corrupt it to work against the user.

Problem: Users can use general purpose computers and browsers to playback copyrighted video and audio.

Solution: Insert DRM and "trusted computing" to corrupt them to work against the user.

Problem: Users can compile and run whatever they want on their computers.

Solution: Walled gardens, security gatekeeping, locked down app stores, and developer registration/attestation to ensure only the right sort of applications can be run, working against the users who want to run other software.

Problem: Users aren't updating their software to get the latest thing we are trying to shove down their throats.

Solution: Web apps and SAAS so that the developer is in control of what the user must run, working against the user's desire to run older versions.

Problem: Users aren't buying new devices and running newer operating systems.

Solution: Drop software support for old devices, and corrupt the software to deliberately block users running on older systems.

The thing is that LLMs will always be runnable and have world knowledge on your own, so they can't 'force' me to use their spyware LLM in the same way.

And what if all the supported OS’ in 2040 (only 15 years from now) won’t allow you to run your own LLM without some vendor agreed upon encryption format that was mandated by law to keep you “safe” from malicious AI?

There’s fewer and fewer alternatives because the net demand is for walled gardens and curated experiences

I don’t see a future where there is even a concept of “free/libre widescale computing”

I don't think it will take 15 years to do this. The scope of so-called LLM Safety is growing rapidly to encompass "everything corporations don't want users to talk about or do with LLMs (or computers in general)". The obvious other leg of this stool is to use already-built gatekeeping hardware and software to prevent computers from circumventing LLM Safety and that will include running unauthorized local models.

All the pieces are ready today, and I would be shocked if every LLM vendor was not already working on it.

I mean, imo MCP is the first pass at this.

So something like TLS or whatever attestation certificates will be required for hardware acceleration or some shit.