Freedom is a Feature: why competition is a good thing

Freedom builds trust.

People don’t want to feel trapped by the products they use. In an ecosystem full of walled gardens, openness and interoperability aren’t just nice-to-have: they're your competitive advantage.

Platform lock-in is one of the tools of the trade for companies building products without a real moat.

If you can’t win on quality or experience, maybe you can trap people just long enough to squeeze some revenue out of them.

But people feel it: Lock-in creates friction; it quietly drains trust.

The better path? Leave the door open, and make a product so good people don't want to leave.

That’s what makes MCP such a fascinating case study.

Introduced by Anthropic in 2024, MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard that helps developers guide LLM agents to use specific tools and workflows—no more spray-and-pray guessing. It brought structure and predictability to AI automation in a way that hadn’t been possible before.

And crucially: Anthropic open-sourced it.

This has quickly sparked a shift across the industry. Since its launch in November 2024, MCP has become the way to build reliable, agent-powered workflows.

Adoption has been explosive. It's gained so much traction, so quickly, that every major player has adopted it.

OpenAI included.

With $62B in funding and a massive head start (vs. Anthropic’s ~$18B), OpenAI could’ve tried to ignore MCP, or bury it with their own proprietary solution.

Instead, they embraced it.

Supporting MCP was the only reasonable move - and ultimately, a smart one.

Openness won, and builders, developers, and end users are all better off for it.

Apple’s absence from the LLM conversation is starting to look more and more like Microsoft’s infamous fumble on mobile in the early 2000s. Siri has missed the moment - and unless Apple makes a major acquisition soon or has a surprise launch in their back pocket, they may be sitting out the next platform shift entirely. 🍎

• Model Context Protocol (MCP) Docs The official intro to MCP; it's still early days and these docs are evolving quickly, but they are the place to start.

• OpenAI Agents SDK – MCP Support OpenAI’s implementation of MCP, complete with setup and examples.

• Google's Agent Development Kit mentions support for MCP as part of their three-pillar approach to building production AI products.

• 🎙️ Accidental Tech Podcast – Ep. 635: An Effective Operator ATP digs into Apple’s LLM absence, and why it might haunt them long-term. (Marco’s comments on this feel… prophetic.)

For my 🇺🇸 readers:

Republicans in Congress have introduced the SAVE Act - a bill that would make it nearly impossible for millions of eligible Americans to register to vote.

This bill would require in-person registration with a passport or birth certificate—which tens of millions of Americans don’t have easy access to. It's not about security. It’s about suppression.

So much for openness and freedom.

They’re counting on you to be too tired, too distracted, or too polite to fight back. Prove them wrong.

Save yourself from the worst type of vendor lock-in imaginable.

Call your goddamn senator, and give 'em hell.

👉 5calls.org/issue/save-act-voter-suppression