There are some pretty wild downstream effects in a world with trillions of agents using the internet and software. One very big one is what happens with agents with budgets and wallets. There are lots of business models that never ended up working out for the human-based internet that all of a sudden start to make economic sense in an agent-based internet. Think of all the proprietary data and research that’s sitting out there right now behind a paywall that a human will never run into. Finance data, medical research, and so on. Most people won’t sign up for a $100 or $1000 subscription for information they need infrequently. The cost is too high. Equally, micropayments for this data rarely worked at scale because the volume was too low to matter. However, now an agent can have a budget for a specific set of research it’s doing, and the agent might pay $0.1 or $1 to access it in a workflow. And now that data may be relevant in 1,000X’s more use-cases than it was before. Similarly, there are many APIs and tools out there on the web that don’t make sense to have a subscription for, but now an agent may interact with for a specific exchange, and it could cost $.01 or $0.1 per transaction. All of a sudden new kinds of software can get built and monetized that would have been uneconomical before. Some new form of commercial open source, essentially. Obviously lots of infrastructure and agreement across the industry is needed for this -and getting discovered by the agent is going to be a whole new class of search and discovery problem- but there are so many potentially interesting new scenarios here.

There are some pretty wild downstream effects in a world with trillions of agents using the internet and software. One very big one is what happens with agents with budgets and wallets. There are lots of business models that never ended up working out for the human-based internet that all of a sudden start to make economic sense in an agent-based internet. Think of all the proprietary data and research that’s sitting out there right now behind a paywall that a human will never run into. Finance data, medical research, and so on. Most people won’t sign up for a $100 or $1000 subscription for information they need infrequently. The cost is too high. Equally, micropayments for this data rarely worked at scale because the volume was too low to matter. However, now an agent can have a budget for a specific set of research it’s doing, and the agent might pay $0.1 or $1 to access it in a workflow. And now that data may be relevant in 1,000X’s more use-cases than it was before. Similarly, there are many APIs and tools out there on the web that don’t make sense to have a subscription for, but now an agent may interact with for a specific exchange, and it could cost $.01 or $0.1 per transaction. All of a sudden new kinds of software can get built and monetized that would have been uneconomical before. Some new form of commercial open source, essentially. Obviously lots of infrastructure and agreement across the industry is needed for this -and getting discovered by the agent is going to be a whole new class of search and discovery problem- but there are so many potentially interesting new scenarios here.

Subsidizing tokens for your most active users may look insane, but this strategy actually is reasonable at this stage. The world is about to go through a shift in its workflows. Lowering that hurdle to prove that it actually works as easily as possible is a very reasonable strategy. The power users will be the ones that push the limits of the technology and prove out what’s possible to advance the state of the art practices. The companies that do this will end up building bigger moats because they will capture more data, user behavior, and workflow lock-in. The risk to the customer of course is they raise prices over time, certainly, so this is something for customers to factor in; and especially enterprises should have a good sense of the “true” cost of their AI for the moment that eventually happens. But the thing that makes this type of subsidization very different from other categories is compute pricing -over a long enough time period- will always come down. The models will get more efficient, the chips will get better, we’ll find cheaper sources of power, batch jobs can be done at more efficient times, open weight models will force more competition, and so on.