Btw one emergent use case we've seen growing rapidly has been code execution for AI agents. Would love thoughts/questions/feedback if you’re working on things in that space: https://webcontainers.io/ai
It's somewhat specific to our use case as you'll see when you read through. A motivation for securing this was that we've had issues (one instance in particular) where we caught a direct competitor directly copy+pasting code from our compiled builds into their own competing product. Asking them nicely to stop didn't do anything, nor getting emails from our lawyers.
The main lever a startup has to solve this is to keep innovating and being the best product in the market, which is what we have done & continue to do. But having a patent is a useful lever for general deterrence from bad actors like this. (Also want to say thanks and give credit to Vinay Hiremath, cofounder of Loom, who went through similar in the early days of Loom and helped point us down the path of securing a patent)
At some point I intend to write a blog post about what happened so other startups have a frame of reference on how to deal with this sort of thing. Truly wild stuff and can be very counterintuitive.