Six Months of the Identity Layer: Why Anthropic, Microsoft, and OpenAI All Made the Same Bet

Short summary

In February–June 2026, Anthropic, Microsoft, and OpenAI independently converged on persistent identity as the critical next axis for AI agents—powerful validation of the thesis. All three locked it into platform-specific implementations. Soul Spec proposes an alternative: an open standard where users own their identity and carry it across vendors without re-teaching each platform.

• •Three frontier labs (Anthropic, Microsoft, OpenAI) independently converged on persistent identity as AI agents' next critical axis in six months.
• •All three implementations lock users into platforms—vendor lock-in.
• •Soul Spec offers an open standard where users own identity files they carry across vendors (Claude, Cursor, OpenAI, etc.).

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.