alt Hacker NewsI feel like a lot of these always on agents tie users deeply into the platform. Unlike models that you can swap between with relative ease, with an agent because of the integrations to other platforms, work history and so on it would be harder to switch, since in effect they are essentially your computer on the cloud.
Tin foil hat version of me thinks that all the closed model companies want to desperately build an abstraction layer on top of the model, so that they can limit access to the model directly and build a locked down relationship with the user.
Other inference providers should counter this by providing their own version of standardized managed agents.
Coincidentally, I published a note on my blog just about this today https://aditya.rs/blog/2026/09/29/inference-providers-should...
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This isn’t tin foil hat, it’s standard corporate strategy - the more of the customer relationship you can own, the better your long-term retention and growth will be.
Lock-in is easy with these agents because they NEED all of your data to be useful, and they will continue to learn internally about you.
But ultimately the AI company CAN choose to just make all the data exportable and open source their product for self-hosting. (The mainstream ones won't, of course, they want to lock you in and hide their AI prompts and algorithms.)
I think what is sorely needed is a version of Dots/Muse without lock-in risk but is still accessible to regular people unlike Openclaw.
Only if these platforms don’t provide anyway to export the text files that contain memories and chat history. If they do allow it, switching it is easy. It’s not like these agents are updating a custom models weights based on your convos. The most important thing they have is the API connections you give them access to so they can access your gmail, calendar, etc.
Actually there is an open source version of dots called Headlong
https://x.com/andykonwinski/status/2091990178638496195
I have not used it myself but it is in my todo list for a while.
It feels like the opposite to me. Moving providers with my Linux VM is incredibly annoying, but with these things, I can (so far) literally ask them to create me a tarball with a README.md and hand it to an agent on the new provider and have it do the rest.
Very true. I have ChatGPT set up to do some recurring tasks (keeping track of developments on a policy proposal in politics; on a weekly basis tracking music releases based on my evolving tastes; checking new book releases; basically doing recurring deep dive web research on my behalf and reporting when there is a significant new finding) and this alone keeps me from switching to another service.
The AI itself is quickly becoming a commodity. The ecosystem is what will keep people tied to one of the companies.
I mean it’s not exactly tin foil hat. I suspect when we see the s1 drop for these companies , the business plan will be essentially exactly what you just said.
OpenWebUI has allowed me to avoid this. Combined with OpenTerminal.
I am using zcode with GLM5.3 flash from z.ai due to the extra usage / air drops etc . However nothing I’m doing is tied to that harness.
When I moved from crush to Zcode , the first thing I did was tell Zcode to migrate all of my crush customizations to Zcode and to set things up in a harness agnostic way going forward. It did.
So the harness specific setup is just symbolic links to the canonical .md file in various git repos. Also the heavy use of redmine / discourse / GLPI (via small go CLi wrappers that crush and Zcode made for me ) allows me to remain context / chat agnostic as well.
I mean OpenClaw being acquired by 'Open'AI says it all doesn't it?
That seems like the intent for sure… but behind the scenes, they are really the LLM with a hosted sandbox. I’m still thinking any sort of moat will be difficult & agent services that can use multiple LLMs will be popular.