Three vendors, three continents, one giveaway

Google released AX v0.3.0 under Apache 2.0 on September 20. WSO2 took Agent Manager to general availability under Apache 2.0 on September 21 with self-hosting and a sandboxed Kubernetes runtime. Huawei Cloud used its September 21 Connect keynote to report its openJiuwen open-source edition of AgentArts past 50,000 stars and 3.29 million downloads.

Three companies that would all rather sell you an agent platform, giving away the control plane inside two days.

AX is the most interesting of the three technically. It exposes Task, Workspace, network-policy and model primitives as ax.io/v1alpha1 YAML you apply with ax apply -f, which is Kubernetes muscle memory pointed at agents. Each task runs as a lightweight actor on Agent Substrate with sub-second checkpoint, suspend and resume, so an agent blocked on a model response or a slow tool stops burning compute instead of sitting in a loop holding a container. It took 4,478 stars and #1 on Hacker News at 533 points on release day. The "generative workspaces" feature, where you describe an environment in English and an agent provisions it before your task starts, is the part I'd want to try before believing.

Google's framing in the repo is that agents are neither microservices nor batch jobs, which matches what I've hit building anything long-running. A microservice assumes stateless request/response. A batch job assumes it runs to completion. An agent is a long-lived thing that blocks on external latency for most of its life, and neither existing model prices that correctly.

The business read: everybody spent 2026 trying to sell orchestration as a product, and orchestration turned out to be table stakes. WSO2 charges for managed hosting above the free control plane. Google wants you on its inference. Huawei wants you on its accelerators. The layer itself is now a customer-acquisition cost.

For a builder, this is good news with a catch. Pick on operational fit, because you're no longer paying for lock-in you were about to pay for anyway. The catch is that free-and-open from a vendor whose revenue sits one layer down means the roadmap serves that layer. AX's checkpoint/resume is genuinely useful to you and also genuinely useful to Google's compute billing. Those align today. Check whether they still align when you're the one deciding to run somewhere else.

Salesforce is the counter-example on the pricing side. The Register reported September 21 that Salesforce is running seats, Flex Credits consumption and outcome fees simultaneously, plus Agentforce Enterprise License Agreements and the newer Salesforce Commit. CRM GM Bill Patterson told an investor webinar the company is still devising a structure aligned to realized benefit, and conceded that agents spanning multiple domains have no single measurable result to price against. An analyst quoted in the piece called it an anxiety-filled architecture of contract frameworks. When the vendor hasn't decided what it's selling, you're negotiating against a moving target.