Keynote: Building an Open Agentic Future - Samuel Colvin, Founder, Pydantic
The AI agent ecosystem is at a crossroads. Unsurprisingly, every major player is chasing revenue, but in doing so many seem to have forgotten the lessons of the early internet. Instead of openness, we’re seeing a rush toward lock-in and walled gardens.
At Pydantic, we believe (and hope) the future can be different.
We built Pydantic AI as an open, robust foundation for building applications powered by LLMs, focused on good engineering, clarity, and reliability rather than the next AI hype cycle. Lots of people seemed to like that idea, and Pydantic AI has grown very fast.
But can it last? With trillions in market cap behind closed ecosystems — from Google and Microsoft to OpenAI and Anthropic — can a small group of open-source developers build a framework that competes, endures, and continues to grow? We think so.
In this talk, I’ll share how we’re approaching that challenge, why openness in the agent ecosystem matters more than ever, and what a sustainable, community-driven future might look like.