The Battle That Shall Not Be Fought
How context portability turns a battlefield into common ground
The last few years in AI have felt like watching a war unfold in real time. The battleground keeps shifting.
First, it was all about models: who could build the biggest, smartest, most capable foundation model. Then the fight moved to applications: who could build the most useful copilots and automate workflows faster than everyone else. More recently, it moved to the talent front: who could assemble the best team and ship faster than the rest.
All these battles are still ongoing but a far more important one is emerging. In the upcoming war for context, your digital life is on the line, and AI companies are fighting to monopolize it.
The next front: your context
Whoever controls your personal context will win the war.
Context isn’t just “data”. It’s the understanding of you, derived from your data. Your context is the biography written by your online interactions: an accurate representation of your history, relationships, preferences, and intentions.
Your context is what transforms generic chatbots into truly personal assistants.
AI companies know that if they can gather all your context, their models will not become commoditized as it will be much harder for you to switch. That’s why they are rapidly trying to become the platform that will run your life.
Once a company controls your full context, it achieves escape velocity. No one else will be able to catch up and eventually what started as your favorite AI assistant will be the one mediating your life, deciding who you meet, what you know and where you go. Ultimately, their incentives will be about extracting more and more from you rather than serving you best.
The stakes are higher than ever before, the war is getting ferocious, and you are in the middle of it.
Invert, always invert
The battle over your context is one that shall not be fought. This battle is based on the assumption that your context is a scarce resource for companies to monopolize: if one controls it, others will not have it.
Let’s now invert that and assume your context is abundant, perfectly replicable and, most importantly, yours. Suddenly, the battleground shifts. Instead of a prize to be won, you become the ultimate judge of who can access your context to serve you best.
Luckily for all of us, the main ingredient of your context is your data. And this is:
abundant: platforms like Google and Meta have been gathering your online interactions for decades
perfectly replicable: data can be infinitely copied at near zero cost
yours: regulations around the world e.g. Digital Markets Act are making it really clear that your data is yours and you shall be able to port it wherever you want
Unlike talent or infrastructure, your context isn’t a scarce resource. It’s not zero-sum: if one company has it, it doesn’t mean others can’t. You can port it wherever you want.
Enabling context portability
Context portability turns the context battlefield into common ground.
Fabric is building the first context portability infrastructure to enable people to control their personal context and bring it to their favorite apps and agents.
When your context is portable, the incentives change. Instead of a zero-sum race for control, companies are forced to focus on what actually matters: adding value to you.
Thanks to Fabric, companies will not have to fight over people’s context. The battle will be for delivering the best services. And that’s one worth fighting for.
Great post — especially the inversion that context isn’t scarce and shouldn’t be monopolized. Making it portable genuinely reframes the incentives.
What struck me reading this is that once context is abundant and replicable, the pressure seems to move up a layer. In an agentic world, access to context is only half the story — the other half is who’s allowed to act using it, and under what constraints, at execution time.
Portability turns the context war into common ground, as you say. It also makes permission and accountability the next place where things either stay competitive or recentralize quietly. Feels like the natural sequel to this argument rather than a contradiction.
Great piece.
Hey, great read as always, you're spot on about the coming battle for context and the implications for our digtal lives, though I'm secretly hoping the AIs will just get overwhelmed trying to index all my messy, slightly irrational human preferences.