The Session You Cannot Take With You

The session you cannot take with you: Inference APIs are moving away from providing a portable transcript of AI sessions. Instead, the output now includes provider-bound state that is not meant to be transferred between different models or providers. This changes the ownership of the session, as the transcript on your machine is no longer your complete session, but a partial view controlled by the inference provider.

The archive should contain enough information for another model to continue the work, but it should not require the old provider's data, decryption, or knowledge. Terms like "encrypted_content" may sound like a privacy feature, but they actually hide data from the user. Providers can choose to encrypt content that the client cannot read, and define where the data can be replayed.

While some encryption benefits user privacy, it does not hide the data from the inference provider. Providers store responses by default, making it difficult for users to have a full, portable transcript. Portability means something more modest: the archive should contain enough intelligible information for another model to continue the work without needing the old provider's state.