The seat that captures value in the AI era is neither the model nor the app but a defensible token path. In 2026 a16z proposed "being in the token path" as the new rule for picking winners, and the same year Benedict Evans warned that even there the productivity gain gets competed away. ASAP synthesizes the two insights into what actually wins in the AI era.

The rule for picking winners has changed

David George of a16z says the rule for picking winners changed in 2026. The market grows larger, but predicting who captures that value has gotten harder. Instead of oscillating between "model or app," the number one screen now is whether a company sits in the token path.

What the token path is

The token path is the channel where LLM inference, from token input to token output, actually happens. Sitting in that channel brings two things. First, it captures value automatically from the flow as AI usage explodes. Second, it is hard to remove because it holds the workflow.

But value gets competed away

Benedict Evans warns that value can be competed away even when you sit in the token path. If a discounted-cash-flow analysis drops from a week to 10 seconds, you do 50 times more of them, but you cannot charge more. A feature anyone can build becomes a competitive necessity, the productivity gain is offset, and the surplus flows to customers rather than to vendor margins.

The real winning seat — a defensible token path

The synthesis of a16z and Benedict Evans is a single answer: a defensible token path. Merely sitting in the flow is not enough; you must hold the seat with proprietary data, a hard-to-break workflow, and accumulating context. Only then can you avoid being copied when model companies leg up into applications.

What you should build

What you need is not a new foundation model but an agent that holds a proprietary workflow. Training a model is a capital-intensive game for a few labs, and the token path does not mean owning a model. You use models via API and layer your own context, memory, tools, and workflow on top to hold a flow that is hard to copy. Cursor, through which every line of a developer's generated code passes, is one example of holding that seat.

Wrap-up

The winning seat in the AI era is position, not model ownership. Combining a16z's "token path" with Benedict Evans's "value competed away," the battleground is a token path defended by a proprietary workflow. You do not need to build a model; the key is building a product that holds a hard-to-remove flow on top of one.

Source: a16z, "The New Rule for Picking AI Winners" (2026-05-29); a16z, "The Economics of AI Usage and What's Next For SaaS" (Benedict Evans, 2026-06-08).