Logical Hardware

Read Anthropic’s Managed Agents post this morning. The gist is they’re decoupling the agent brain from the hands, making the harness stateless. Their own post says this mirrors how operating systems virtualized hardware decades ago.

That OS line stuck with me. If Claude is the OS, then all the agents people are building on top of it are apps, and the infra layer underneath is basically logical hardware.

Then I started thinking about the mobile age. There’s a book called Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution about that era. What made mobile interesting was that the players all came from completely different genes. Apple was really a hardware company underneath, Google was and still is an advertising business, and Microsoft was enterprise to the core. Everyone was fighting in the same arena for completely different reasons. Microsoft is out of the mobile game now, but that’s a longer story.

Now look at AI. Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini. Yes Google is still ads deep down, but the actual product all three are shipping is the same thing, which is tokens, and the business model is essentially the same. It reminds me more of mobile operators from the 2000s like AT&T, Verizon, China Mobile. Everyone selling minutes and data by the gigabyte, fighting on coverage and bundles and price.

So the competition logic is pretty different from the mobile dogfight. Nobody has a real gene advantage this time. The moat has to be built, not inherited.

Which means these AI platforms are going to keep clearing obstacles on the path of selling more tokens. Either build the road or buy the road, but the road has to exist or the tokens don’t flow. Same logic as Nvidia buying Groq early before anyone else could lock that piece down. Whether Managed Agents turns out to be that kind of road for Anthropic or just one small piece of plumbing, I can’t tell yet. The shape of the move is still the same shape.

Since we’re still heads down building Ventify, Claude for Financial Services hits close to home for me. That one fits the same pattern. Anthropic isn’t trying to become a bank or a hedge fund, they’re paving an example, showing what the vertical could look like so other people build on top and burn tokens doing it. Apple did the same in the early App Store days. Apple would quietly copy the best developer ideas into iOS when it suited them, wiping out whole categories of small apps, but still had to leave enough room for developers to keep building, otherwise the platform dies and the store goes empty.

Anthropic is in a similar spot. They have to build the OS layer with the logical hardware underneath it, and paint a few reference apps on top just to show people what the shape of the thing could be. They can’t eat everything though, the tokens only flow if other people keep writing the apps.

Haha, so in the end it really is just selling tokens. All the fancy infra is there to make the tokens cheaper and stickier. Everything else is set dressing.