Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft agree that the harness is the product. They disagree on the price.
Summary
Frontier labs and cloud providers are treating the agent 'harness'—the runtime, orchestration, memory, and tooling around models—as a distinct product and have launched competing offerings. Anthropic launched Managed Agents with a hosted session-hour fee (about $0.08/session hour), while OpenAI released an open-source Agents SDK that avoids a first-party runtime meter and charges only standard model and tool usage; Google and Microsoft are packaging priced primitives and AWS plans Bedrock integrations. The moves create divergent pricing models and strategic paths: managed hosted runtimes, component-based metering, and open-source SDKs tied to model revenue. This divergence raises new benchmarks for build-vs-buy decisions, increases pressure on horizontal orchestration startups, and forces teams and vendors to choose differentiation strategies around governance, vertical depth, multi-model control, or price.
