Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch on the fight to split off models from agents

Russell Brandom interviews Vercel’s Guillermo Rauch, whose central question is whether the model and the agent stay coupled. Rauch’s bet is that they come apart, and that companies will want to mix providers rather than commit to one lab. His reasoning is commercial rather than ideological: once you are optimising for production instead of demos, you start looking at price/performance, and at that point Gemini, DeepSeek and open-weight models become real options alongside OpenAI and Anthropic.

The numbers he gives for Vercel’s own vantage point: 6 million deployments a day, half of them triggered by coding agents, and more than a trillion tokens a day through the AI gateway. He names two killer apps for agents so far, coding agents and internal corporate agents that need careful access to company data, with Vercel Sandbox aimed at the second by restricting what an agent can reach without dulling it.

The framing to remember is the positioning. We’re going to be the AWS of this generation, so obviously we’re fighting for a world of open protocols. Worth reading with that in mind: a company selling the neutral layer has an obvious interest in the layer above staying unbundled.