API Gatekeepers vs AI Barbarians

Every platform shift starts the same way. There is a small group that controls access and they define the rules and collect rent. Everyone else builds inside some defined lines. But then the lines suddenly stop mattering.

Act I: Mobile, When the App Stores Ruled the World

In the early days of mobile, Apple and Google were the ultimate gatekeepers as they owned the distribution, payments, identity, and discovery layers. So if you wanted to reach users, you went through the App Store. Developers fought over keywords, startups optimized for approval cycles and entire businesses lived or died based on these platform policies that had absolute control. But over time something started to change.

The most successful mobile companies didn’t try to beat the App Store, they built new habits the App Store couldn’t replicate or incorporate into their ecosystems. For example, Instagram didn’t win because of better APIs, Uber didn’t win because of distribution hacks, WhatsApp didn’t win because of store placement. They did well because they owned a new daily behavior and the App Store became plumbing or infrastructure, not power.

Of course, the gatekeepers still took their cut (and still does!), but the value had already moved up the stack.

Act II: Cloud, When Infrastructure Became Invisible

Cloud followed the same arc. AWS, Azure, and GCP were the new kings as they controlled compute, storage, networking, pricing, etc. So early on, everyone built on top of them... but a new wave of companies emerged that didn’t sell infrastructure at all. They sold outcomes.

Companies like Salesforce didn’t sell servers, or Snowflake didn’t sell storage, Stripe didn’t sell payments infrastructure. They sold abstractions and ways of working that were much more efficient and fast than the old ones.

To customers, AWS became irrelevant (like the App Store), and to all SaaS companies, it became a cost line inside of their COGS. The cloud providers still won, of course, but (again) they didn’t own the customer relationship. They owned the pipes and new players owned the workflows.

Act III: The AI Wave, Barbarians at the API Gate

So here we are again, repeating history. The new gatekeepers are model providers, data platforms, and software companies with API control/access, charging for pricing, rate limits, capability releases. They believe the power lives in the API, but history says otherwise. The new barbarians aren’t building better APIs, but better decisions.

The barbarians at the gate are not asking users to prompt, or exposing models, they don’t explain how things work on the back end they just get the job done. And when that happens, the API disappears, just like the App Store did, and just like cloud infrastructure did.

The Lesson

The barbarians don’t need to break the gate, they just need to make it irrelevant (as we learned from previous technology cycles), gatekeepers win the early phase of every wave but then barbarians always find a way to win the moment users stop caring how things work. They just want to be done with it.

In mobile, habits destroyed distribution... and in cloud, SaaS workflows did the same with infrastructure. In AI, outcomes and jobs being done will break API access as they naturally move up the stack.