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.
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.
https://x.com/andykonwinski/status/2091990178638496195
I have not used it myself but it is in my todo list for a while.
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.
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.
The AI itself is quickly becoming a commodity. The ecosystem is what will keep people tied to one of the companies.
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.
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.