Let's say you have a company that tries to make online checkout more efficient by predicting which payment the user will prefer, and research shows that if the

Let's say you have a company that tries to make online checkout more efficient by predicting which payment the user will prefer, and research shows that if the user is first presented with a payment method they use, they are more likely to buy. If I subscribe to your API and get the outputs of your predictions, since I can see the kinds of inputs that you tell me are associated with preferring PayPal, I can approximate your PayPal-preference model. This works for basically any machine learning model-as-service. So if I invest heavily in approximating and then serving models more at lower cost than anyone else, that might be a viable businese.