The AI ecosystem is moving too fast for moats. Every closed advantage leaks. Every walled garden gets mapped. What used to protect you now isolates you. The defensible position today isn’t the highest wall — it’s the bridge everyone else depends on to cross.
For years, defensibility meant isolation. Own the data. Control the stack. Lock down the ecosystem. Those strategies worked when products were discrete and distribution was finite. You could draw boundaries around users, APIs, and markets. The slower the world moved, the more a moat mattered.
But AI has changed the terrain. Every model, API, and dataset can now be reassembled into something new overnight. Differentiation decays faster than ever. A closed system doesn’t just limit competitors; it limits learning and reach. When the environment itself is open, the winners are the ones who orchestrate flow — not the ones who restrict it.
That’s the quiet revolution underway: defensibility has gone dynamic.
The advantage now comes from enabling movement — from being the bridge that others must cross to get to opportunity. Bridges are hard to copy because they connect unique endpoints: your customers, your data flows, your partners’ capabilities. Once others build on top of them, you become the default path for value to travel through.
Stripe didn’t dominate payments by owning customers. It became the connective tissue between every business and every payment rail. The same pattern is emerging in AI. Companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Hugging Face are not defending isolated products; they’re building gravitational centers of connectivity. Their power compounds as others rely on them to reach users, data, or distribution.
A bridge strategy requires a mindset shift. Instead of asking, “What can we build that others can’t?”, product leaders need to ask, “What connections can we enable that others won’t?” The companies that thrive in this new era design for participation — exposing APIs, opening ecosystems, and inviting complementary innovation. Defensibility comes not from locking others out but from being the indispensable node they depend on.
This isn’t easy. Bridges require balance. Too open, and you become a commodity; too closed, and you lose network gravity. The art lies in defining the right interfaces — generous enough to attract others, specific enough to retain strategic control. The value isn’t in owning every interaction, but in owning the infrastructure those interactions depend on.
Moats kept competitors out. Bridges keep ecosystems together.
In an AI-driven world of agents, automation, and interlinked systems, the strongest products won’t win by isolation. They’ll win by indispensable connectivity — by becoming the platform that others can’t operate without, even if they could build alternatives.