The Rebel Alliance

Author: Nick Grossman (USV) URL: https://x.com/nickgrossman/status/2070181707613937866 One-line: USV argues the agentic AI stack will be won by a broad, composable ecosystem of specialized companies (models, orchestration, memory, harnesses, identity, payments) — the “Rebel Alliance” — rather than by any single vertically integrated “Fat Model” platform.

Key claims

• The “Fat Models” thesis says the largest AI labs — each building a vertically integrated platform (own models, APIs, orchestration, agents, products) — will capture all value if they control the model. The market is pricing this in: OpenAI and Anthropic each valued near $1T, Google up 4x in three years to over $4T.
• USV’s historical pattern-matching says value tends to migrate away from the “fat” integrated layer toward an ecosystem around it. Cited precedents: IBM’s integrated mainframe unbundled by the PC ecosystem; Microsoft’s desktop unbundled by the web; telcos’ vertically integrated networks unbundled by the internet; Apple’s integrated computing platform outpaced in market share by the more composable Android (70%+ of smartphones); AWS’s $100B+ platform still spawned an ecosystem of multi-billion-dollar companies specializing at layers above it.
• Agentic traffic on the web has reportedly surpassed human traffic for the first time, and agents increasingly run as infrastructure — via harnesses and CLIs, composed across services — rather than as single-vendor consumer apps.
• Four structural forces favor the “Rebel Alliance” (ecosystem) over the “Fat Model” (integrated) thesis: fierce multi-model competition (frontier-model advantage now measured in single-digit points on commercial workloads); application scope too vast for any one company to build the best solution everywhere; production AI’s need for data residency, compliance, audit trails, and provider-swapping (favoring modular stacks over single-vendor defaults); and agents being inherently distributed across data sources and services rather than confined to one platform.
• USV names the specific layers it’s watching: orchestration (the control plane), harnesses (“if the LLM is the brain, the harness is the body”), memory (a candidate independent layer as agents share context), a “browser for agents,” routing/model marketplaces, identity (including cryptographic identity), and agent-first payments infrastructure.
• The “Rebel Alliance” framing originated in a prior USV post applying it to the memory layer, now extended to the full agentic stack.

Notable quotes

“We believe that the AI opportunity is too big and too important to be owned by any one company. Instead, we see a massive ecosystem emerging around the agentic AI stack. We refer to it as the Rebel Alliance, and we believe it’s not just competing, but is structurally positioned to lead.”

“Looking back: IBM built the mainframe as a fully integrated system: hardware, software, services – then the PC ecosystem unbundled it. Microsoft owned the desktop, then the web unbundled it… Apple built the most powerful and integrated computing platform ever, and yet Android, the more composable system, runs on over 70% of the world’s smartphones.”

“If the LLM is the brain, the harness is the body — connecting it to the world.”

“Open interfaces invite composability, and composability invites specialization. The resulting ecosystem can compound faster than any single provider could move alone.”

Embedded tweets

Welp, that happened faster than I predicted. Thought it would be end of 2027, then early 2027, but agentic traffic growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet’s history.

— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) · Jun 03, 2026 · View on X

— Nick Grossman (@nickgrossman) · Jun 25, 2026 · View on X

How it connects

• USV — publisher; existing page tracks USV as a thesis-driven VC that articulates a worldview, which this piece exemplifies directly.
• AWS — cited as historical precedent: a dominant integrated cloud platform that still spawned a multi-billion-dollar ecosystem of specialists above it.
• Naval Ravikant — thanked in the piece’s acknowledgments for feedback on drafts.
• Dan Shipper — thanked in the piece’s acknowledgments for feedback on drafts.