The Harness Is the Moat

For nearly two years after ChatGPT launched, a consensus hardened across the technology industry that large language models were destined to become commodities. The logic was intuitive and, on the surface, compelling. DeepSeek built a model for a fraction of the cost of its Western counterparts. Open-source alternatives powered most venture-backed AI startups. If raw model intelligence was converging toward parity, the companies spending tens of billions training frontier models were building sand castles.

The moat, the thinking went, would belong to whoever owned the customer relationship. The weights were table stakes.

That consensus was wrong. Models matter enormously. But the consensus misidentified what the product is. The product is the agent. The agent is a model fused with something far more complex, far more proprietary, far harder to replicate than anyone appreciated until roughly late 2025: the harness.

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