Agents Behind Walls: Who Will Push Over the First Brick

The first two posts covered: CLI vs MCP is a fight over pipes — what's actually missing is the faucet (post one); Agent adoption is blocked by two layers of barriers — platform lock-in and organizational control (post two). This post looks at how different players are actually responding to those two walls. Three Strategies Faced with data barriers, three distinct strategies have emerged: Strategy 3 has plenty of representatives. OpenClaw runs 24/7 on a Mac mini, and the community has built Skills for auto-generating daily standup reports[2] and financial statements. Perplexity launched Personal Computer[5] in March 2026, also running on a Mac mini, connecting to 40+ services including Gmail, Slack, GitHub, Notion, and Salesforce for $200/month. Anthropic's Claude Cowork positions itself as a locally autonomous Agent. The demo videos show data flowing seamlessly across platforms. These capabilities are real. But they all share one prerequisite: you already have API access to every tool