Access is the killer feature for LLMs not memory

The internet era gave rise to Aggregation Theory. Competition was always “just a click away” but that didn’t matter, the open web was placed behind a text box and a “I’m feeling lucky”. This is what people want.

what customers really want is a single pane of glass experience. They want a single place that can integrate and not just answer questions, but actually take action across all of these places. And that’s where the customer experience is headed. Fareed Mosavat

As the era played out engagement and value has shifted to apps and walled garden experiences. The bazaar of the open web gave rise to large cathedrals. But we don’t want an app for that or this.

Customers are divinely discontent.

What next in the world of LLMs? Clippy for everything

The dynamics are starting to unfold. LLMs are coming for the wall gardens. To date we’ve had MCPs, bringing data to the model. That is one battleground but will play out more in the business arena, i.e. Slack limiting access to its API and restricting their terms of services, limiting what companies can and can’t do with their own data.

The agents have arrived. Many dubbed 2025 the year of agent and they were right. Agents need access. Access is increasingly hard to come by as more of web barracades itself behind walled gardens. The web is built on a a zero trust architecture, you must verify who you are and what you have access to. Agents will be no different. The answer is not to get nerd sniped but some new thing, some new standard for authorisation, just give the agents access. We don’t want to wait for everyone to adopt some new standard. In order for LLMs to aggregate todays wall gardens you need a new point of aggregation, authentication.

OpenAI should buy 1Password

The dynamic of “super apps” such as WeChat could look quiant in the next cycle. Agents (+ MCP + APIs) has the possibility to give rise to deliverying on the sci-fi experience of us interacting with HAL 9000, a single voice, a single pane of glass.

The winners, the best in breed are embracing this future. Shopify and Stripe for example will provide the payments layer. Every number 2 in a category will let their data flow through MCPs to drive adoption. The final bastion to fall will be wall gardens and cathedrals constructured in the last twenty years. Without access the experience is going to be very frustrating. One of the large research labs, probably OpenAI, should buy 1Password to accelrate this change. Memory is not a moat, you own your key data so it will be portable or bootstrapped in the product experience.

1Password has spent 16 years building something you can’t sprint to create, trust. They’re the digital equivalent of Swiss banks, but for passwords instead of Nazi gold. You’re not buying a password manager, you’re buying the rails for the agent economy. Many would happily hand O3 the keys.

This revolution will be driven by the people. This is what we want, to write poetry, do the higher skilled work or most likely amuse ourselves to death whilst our agents are off doing the tedious things, like buying our best friend a wedding gift.