I 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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rheisen_ 12 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I've been building https://blackbear.app to address the security and data privacy concerns of using agents as personal assistants, and in general to tackle collaboration. I think using Muse or Grok Bot or this new Dots thing is insane... like what an abandonment of self-respect and privacy

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2001zhaozhao an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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rheisen_ 11 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

https://blackbear.app, literally been building this for almost a year

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aditya_rs an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Yep, that's what I think and wrote on my blog. My hope is that the inference providers should provide a managed service like it. It's also in their best interest to do so, because if they don't and these provider hosted agents become the norm, demand for independent inference would drop.

	▲	2001zhaozhao an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> It's also in their best interest to do so, because if they don't and these provider hosted agents become the norm, demand for independent inference would drop. I disagree with this part. AI companies will want to try their damndest to control distribution of AI, so that they can enshittify later. Consumers conscious of this will want an alternative, of course. Might be niche similar to how Kagi is in search because big tech will always have a AI inference cost advantage + making users the product (extra $ from ads & purchase cuts) + the good old strategy of dumping.

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lxgr an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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aditya_rs an hour ago | parent [-]

Possibly so for now. But do you think the providers are interested in making interoperability easy?

Even in the future if they are required by law to provide it, I wouldn't bet against the craftiness of the providers to invent some sort of network effect dark pattern to make it painful, if not outright impossible.

Just as an example, with Muse I can already see that the way they are thinking of making money is via taking a transaction cut, so it's not that hard to imagine that Meta can negotiate deals for txns that happens through Muse which won't be available elsewhere.

	▲	lxgr an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Obviously I don't expect them to intentionally help me move to the competition, but I do wonder whether obscure data formats as a moat are a thing of the past. Your second point is where I'd imagine the future moats to live: Exclusivity deals with service providers. Things are already in motion with Amazon banning and Shopify explicitly inviting Muse; we'll probably see much more of that.

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leokennis an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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reachableceo an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

	▲	lxgr an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> 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. This works for hosted mass-market solutions just as well! ChatGPT and Claude allow me to download all of my data, and these days data formats are less of a moat than ever given that you can just hand them to an LLM and have that worry about importing it into your new thing for you. I've even seen explicit "offboarding prompts" to hand to your old agent, e.g. in Meta Muse.

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alpineman 31 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean OpenClaw being acquired by 'Open'AI says it all doesn't it?