Anthropic Bets on Agent Ecosystem Over Walled Garden

Training Data (Sequoia) · rss · 2026-07-14

Anthropic's Katelyn Lesse and Angela Jiang discuss building an ecosystem rather than a "walled garden," where external developers and Anthropic's own products build on the same developer platform.

They abstract the platform into three layers: knowledge, execution, and coordination. The real leverage lies in the top "strategies" layer—a meta-orchestration mechanism where tokens take on different roles like suggesting, executing, reflecting, or remembering. They also mention partnering with Modal, Vercel, and Cloudflare for self-hosted sandboxes, emphasizing the importance of standardized connectors and MCP specs.

A key stance is their willingness to open up capabilities like skills and MCP to the entire industry, allowing Claude and non-Claude agents to interconnect. However, model routing remains closed, as they believe harnesses are best tuned for a single model family rather than generalizing across models.

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