The AI-data category spans a steep moat gradient that its collective label obscures. I see the top as toll‑booths—proprietary data fused to sticky professional workflows that a court affirmed cannot be relabeled or synthesized around; the middle as scarce but non‑exclusive corpora and challenged owners; the bottom as annotation and labeling services—labor arbitrage with low switching costs. The organizing distinction is that a unique corpus is a stock you own, while annotation capacity is a flow you rent, and scarcity raises the former’s value far more durably.
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