Enterprises are making agentic tooling decisions right now without enough information. That’s not a criticism. The information doesn’t exist yet.
Today’s pricing tells you almost nothing about tomorrow’s. Cursor reportedly runs negative gross margins on its power users. The cost spread between coding agents is an order of magnitude wide, and the customers getting the most value are the ones the vendor most needs to reprice. The hidden cost shows up at renewal, not during the demo.
The harder fragmentation is vertical, and it’s just starting. Anthropic recently shipped ten task-specific agents for financial services, including pitchbook construction, KYC screening, and earnings review. Perplexity launched a finance product with 35 dedicated workflows. The agentic tooling decision is no longer a model choice. It’s a vertical commitment, contracting at the agent layer rather than the model layer. The switching cost ceases to be the model and becomes the entire operational pipeline above it.
Your Vendor’s Risk Appetite
What you actually adopt with that pipeline is the vendor’s risk appetite. Imagine buying a fleet of company cars in which the manufacturer can remotely set the speed limit under a contract it signed with the military. Their safety stance becomes yours, authored contract by contract rather than industry-wide. The Pentagon’s recent vendor selection made the pattern visible: Anthropic was excluded for refusing to work on autonomous weapons and surveillance, while eight other vendors signed contracts that carried broadly the same restrictions Anthropic refused. Whichever side of that line your vendor sits on, you inherit it.
The tools work. The demos are impressive. The early productivity gains are real. The cost arrives eighteen months later, when you’re trying to standardize, govern, and scale something that was never designed to be governed.
Before your next agentic tooling decision, ask not what it enables. Ask whose risk appetite you’re inheriting.
References: Sites.diy, “Coding Plan Comparisons” (May 2026); Contrary Research, “Cursor’s $60B Escape Hatch” (May 2026); Anthropic, “Finance Agents” (May 2026); CNBC, “Pentagon AI Vendor Roster” (May 2026); Perplexity, “Computer for Professional Finance” (May 2026).
