AI Session Portability: Why Your AI Conversations Are Becoming Lock-In [2026]

The original promise of an inference API was wonderfully simple: send some input, receive some output, and if you kept both, you had the conversation. You could inspect it, archive it, replay it, or hand it to a different model. The transcript belonged to you. That abstraction is quietly breaking. A growing share of what an AI session produces — reasoning tokens, search evidence, compaction state,…