As AI makes it trivial to scrape data and bypass native UIs, companies will retaliate by shutting down open APIs and creating walled gardens to protect their business models. This mirrors the early web's shift away from open standards like RSS once monetization was threatened.
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In an AI-driven ecosystem, data and content need to be fluidly accessible to various systems and agents. Any SaaS platform that feels like a "walled garden," locking content away, will be rejected by power users. The winning platforms will prioritize open, interoperable access to user data.
The idea of a truly "open web" was a brief historical moment. Powerful, proprietary "organizing layers" like search engines and app stores inevitably emerge to centralize ecosystems and capture value. Today's AI chatbots are simply the newest form of these organizing layers.
The assumption that startups can build on frontier model APIs is temporary. Emad Mostaque predicts that once models are sufficiently capable, labs like OpenAI will cease API access and use their superior internal models to outcompete businesses in every sector, fulfilling their AGI mission.
ChatGPT's inability to access The Wirecutter, owned by the litigious New York Times, exemplifies how corporate conflicts create walled gardens. This limits the real-world effectiveness of AI agents, showing business disputes can be as significant a barrier as technical challenges, preventing users from getting simple answers.
Recent security breaches (e.g., Gainsight/Drift on Salesforce) signal a shift. As AI agents access more data, incumbents can leverage security concerns to block third-party apps and promote their own integrated solutions, effectively using security as a competitive weapon.
By creating an open standard for AI shopping agents with major retailers, Google is making a classic platform play. Rather than building a walled garden, it's defining the rules of the road. This ensures its own AI agents (and accompanying ad products) will be central to the future of e-commerce, regardless of which companies build on the protocol.
Tim Berners-Lee warns that as AI summarizes content and performs tasks for users, people will stop visiting websites directly. This breaks the flow of traffic and ad revenue that sustains countless online publishers and content creators.
OpenAI's platform strategy, which centralizes app distribution through ChatGPT, mirrors Apple's iOS model. This creates a 'walled garden' that could follow Cory Doctorow's 'inshittification' pattern: initially benefiting users, then locking them in, and finally exploiting them once they cannot easily leave the ecosystem.
Google is leveraging Chrome's dominance to control the AI landscape. By introducing proprietary, non-standard APIs for local LLMs, they encourage web developers to build experiences optimized for Gemini, effectively creating a moat and making it harder for other AI models to compete on the web.
The New York Times' lawsuit against OpenAI prevents ChatGPT from accessing content from its subsidiary, Wirecutter. This highlights how legal battles over proprietary data are creating "walled gardens," limiting the capabilities of AI agents and forcing users back to traditional web browsing for specific tasks.
