The future of intelligence is being set right now, and the path we’re on leads somewhere I don’t want to go. We’re drifting toward a world where intelligence is something you rent — where your ability to reason, create, and decide flows through systems you don’t control, can’t inspect, and didn’t shape. In that world, the landlord can change the terms anytime, and you have no recourse but to accept what you’re given.
I think we can do better. Making that happen is now central to what Mozilla is doing.
What we did for the web
Twenty-five years ago, Microsoft Internet Explorer controlled 95% of the browser market, which meant Microsoft controlled how most people experienced the internet and who could build what on what terms. Mozilla was born to change this, and Firefox succeeded beyond what most people thought possible — dropping Internet Explorer’s market share to 55% in just a few years and ushering in the Web 2.0 era. The result was a fundamentally different internet. It was faster and richer for everyday users, and for developers it was a launchpad for open standards and open source that decentralized control over the core technologies of the web.
There’s a reason the browser is called a “user agent.” It was designed to be on your side — blocking ads, protecting your privacy, giving you choices that the sites you visited never would have offered on their own. That was the first fight, and we held the line for the open web even as social networks and mobile platforms became walled gardens.
Now AI is becoming the new intermediary. It’s what I’ve started calling “Layer 8” — the agentic layer that mediates between you and everything else on the internet. These systems will negotiate on our behalf, filter our information, shape our recommendations, and increasingly determine how we interact with the entire digital world.
The question we have to ask is straightforward: Whose side will your new user agent be on?
Why closed systems are winning (for now)
We need to be honest about the current state of play: Closed AI systems are winning today because they are genuinely easier to use. If you’re a developer with an idea you want to test, you can have a working prototype in minutes using a single API call to one of the major providers. GPUs, models, hosting, guardrails, monitoring, billing — it all comes bundled together in a package that just works. I understand the appeal firsthand, because I’ve made the same choice myself on late-night side projects when I just wanted the fastest path from an idea in my head to something I could actually play with.
The open-source AI ecosystem is a different story. It’s powerful and advancing rapidly, but it’s also deeply fragmented — models live in one repository, tooling in another, and the pieces you need for evaluation, orchestration, guardrails, memory, and data pipelines are scattered across dozens of independent projects with different assumptions and interfaces. Each component is improving at remarkable speed, but they rarely integrate smoothly out of the box, and assembling a production-ready stack requires expertise and time that most teams simply don’t have to spare. This is the core challenge we face, and it’s important to name it clearly: What we’re dealing with isn’t a values problem where developers are choosing convenience over principle. It’s a developer experience problem. And developer experience problems can be solved.
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