Im guessing they’ll make it illegal for users to try to bypass the restriction.

The company could, at any time, render my entire system useless unless I meet their demand

That’s already happening. Louis Rossman has a saga on the topic, including the company threatening legal action against him.

This is happening at my company. They gave us 6 months to build an AI-tool to replace a non-AI tool that has been very well built and tested for 6 years, and works perfectly well. The AI tool has some very amazing features, but it could never replace the good old tool.

The idiot in charge of the project has such a bad vision on the tool, yet likes to overhype it and oversell it so much.