Incumbents Are Starting to Rugpull AI Startups
Slack just reminded Glean that it's just a ChatGPT wrapper..
Yesterday, TheInformation reported that Slack (owned by Salesforce) effectively “rugpulled”(*) knowledge base startups (e.g. Glean) by severely rate limiting its access to Slack conversations history.
While the change itself came out two weeks ago, it apparently hurt Glean and others enough to earn front-page treatment.
From Slack’s perspective, however, it’s a completely reasonable competitive move. Per Slack’s official FAQs, Slack won’t completely kill the API access, but want AI tools to go through the official Slack markeplace (presumably, with a revenue share or pricing constraint). It even teased a new search API that likely replicates much of Glean’s value—and probably won’t be free.
So what’s going on here? Basically, AI incentivizes incumbents to become walled gardens. Being too open allows app-layer products to skim off too much value. To protect themselves, incumbents are now taking countermeasures.
In the rest of this post, I’ll walk through some recent datapoints showing other ways you can get rugpulled (besides API cutoffs), and what you can actually do about it. If you're building an AI SaaS or productized service, pay attention.
(* The term “rugpull” is used loosely here to refer to your upstream and downstream dependencies hurting your product, intentionally)
