Amazon, Microsoft, and Google Are Building the Same Thing: The Enterprise AI Agent Lock-In Trap

Look closely at what AWS, Microsoft, and Google shipped for AI agents this year and you notice something odd. Different names, different branding, and underneath, the exact same product. That convergence is convenient right up until you try to leave. Here's what they're all building and why it should make you a little cautious. What all three are actually building Strip away the marketing and the three big clouds are assembling the same five-part stack for running enterprise AI agents: a managed runtime to execute the agent, memory so it remembers context, identity so it can authenticate and be governed, tools so it can call your systems, and observability so you can see what it did. The products are AWS Bedrock AgentCore, Microsoft's Azure AI Foundry with its Agent365 control plane, and Google's Vertex AI agent stack. They look different on the pricing page. Architecturally, they're the same idea built three times. This isn't a coincidence. When you're solving the same problem, running agents safely inside an enterprise, you land on the same pieces. The market basically agreed on the shape of an agent platform in early 2026, and each hyperscaler raced to own it on their own cloud. Why the convergence feels great at first If your data and identity already live in one cloud, that cloud's agent runtime is the fastest path to production. Your storage is there, your identity system is there, your logging is there. The platform snaps into all of it. You get governance, audit trails, and deployment almost for free. For a team that just wants agents running with proper controls, that's a real gift. I get the appeal. The catch nobody puts on the slide Here's the trap. When your agent's runtime, credentials, state, and telemetry all live inside one cloud, moving it somewhere else isn't a config change. It's a rebuild. Take AWS Bedrock AgentCore. An agent built on it is wired to AWS identity, networking, and storage. Picking it up and moving it to Azure or Google isn't a matt