Home / 57 Definitions / By infrastructure layer

By infrastructure layer

The 57 definitions grouped by infrastructure layer.

Web APIs / REST 28
49% of corpus
A1
Microsoft Research
May 2025 / CACM Jan 2026
This is the most cited definition in the corpus. It is also the least ambitious.
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A2
Stripe / OpenAI
Sep 2025
ACP is the Category A victory lap. Stripe owns the merchant relationship, OpenAI owns the user, and the agent is a convenience layer between two pre-existing customers.
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A3
Google / Shopify / Walmart
Jan 2026
Google's response to ACP: same category, bigger surface area.
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A4
Google / Mastercard / PayPal
2025
AP2 is the most honest Category A definition: OAuth is not an economic model, it is a permission model, and the agent only spends what the human already granted.
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A5
Visa
Mar 2026
Visa's biometric tether is the clearest admission in the corpus that the agentic economy is, at this layer, an interchange-defense project.
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A6
Mastercard
Dec 2025
The agent has a budget, not a bank account. That is the whole definition, and the phrase deserves to be quoted every time someone calls this autonomy.
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A7
McKinsey & Company
Aug 2025
McKinsey names the thing many incumbents depend on and cannot say out loud: the 'inertia dividend.'
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A8
IBM
Jan 2026
The IBM definition is the one that proves Category A has become the default.
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A9
Salesforce
2025–2026
Salesforce's definition is a Trojan horse: call it agentic, sell it as Einstein, and keep the seat licenses intact.
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A10
JPMorgan
2025–2026
JPMorgan's framing is the financial-services version of A1: the agent assists, the advisor approves, the compliance chain is untouched.
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A11
Nosto
2025–2026
The Nosto definition is what happens when an existing recommendation engine gets rebaptized as 'agentic' without rebuilding anything.
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A12
Deloitte (commerce context)
2025
Deloitte's commerce definition and Deloitte's workforce definition (B4) are internally incompatible, which is the single most telling fact about the state of the literature.
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A13
Stripe / Tempo
Mar 2026
MPP is the first serious Category A attempt to describe agent-to-agent payments without abandoning the card rails.
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A14
Jason Cochran
Feb 2026
Cochran's insight is that the unit of value is the workflow, not the transaction — and that is why he ends up describing something that looks like Category B with a Category A byline.
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B1
Gartner
2025–2026
The optimism and the skepticism come from the same analyst house, and the two forecasts are not reconciled anywhere.
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B2
Sequoia Capital (Bob McGrew)
May 2025
McGrew's thesis is clean and ruthless: if supply is near-infinite, price trends to marginal compute cost, and every software company priced on seats is sitting on a cliff.
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B4
Deloitte (Agentic Enterprise)
2025
Here the agent is an employee, not a shopper. Same firm, different deck, different taxonomy.
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B5
Capgemini / OECD
2025
The numbers are real; the framing is strictly enterprise-internal.
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B7
Pascal Bornet et al.
2025
'AI as entrepreneur' is the point where Category B starts to rhyme with Category C.
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B8
NotoriousPLG
Feb 2025
NotoriousPLG's refinement is the useful one: outcome-based pricing is real, but it prices by vertical, not by compute.
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E1
Google (Linux Foundation)
Apr 2025
A2A's silence on payment and settlement is the most consequential design decision in this entire corpus.
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E2
Anthropic
2024
MCP is the tool layer, and like A2A it is deliberately silent on economics.
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E3
Trulioo / Worldpay / Skyfire
2026
Trulioo et al. are doing the unglamorous work of building what the WEF vocabulary requires.
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E5
Forrester / Exista.io
2025–2026
ADO is the moment the agent economy starts generating its own marketing category, which is usually a lagging indicator that the category has become real in the commercial sense.
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E6
IETF
Jan 2026 / Apr 2026 (VCAP v01 + agent-identity cluster)
VCAP is what the verification problem looks like when the IETF takes it seriously.
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E8
a16z (Keycard)
Oct 2025
The 96:1 ratio is the most quotable number in the entire corpus, and it says finance has already crossed the non-human-majority line before anyone wrote a definition for the category.
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A15
Alibaba / Alipay
Jan 2026
The largest working Category-A deployment on the planet is in China, and almost no one in the Western corpus cites it.
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D8
Microsoft Research (arXiv 2603.25893)
Mar 2026
The A1 team came back with equations. The equations say better search does not always help.
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Blockchain / on-chain 16
28% of corpus
C1
Fetch.ai / ASI Alliance
2021–2025
Fetch.ai is the project that has been doing this the longest, which makes its design choices historically load-bearing for the entire category.
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C2
Olas (Valory)
2021–2025
Olas is what the DAO governance model looks like when you take it seriously as economic infrastructure rather than as a slogan.
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C3
Coinbase / Cloudflare
May 2025 / Apr 2026 (v2 + Linux Foundation)
x402 is the cleanest piece of engineering in the entire corpus, and it still requires a crypto wallet.
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C4
Circle
Mar 2026
Circle fixes the micropayment cost problem. It does not fix the wallet provisioning problem, and the wallet provisioning problem is the one that matters for onboarding new economic actors.
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C5
Kite
2026
Kite is the Category C project that most explicitly absorbs the WEF's Know Your Agent language and hardwires it into the chain itself.
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C6
Gate Ventures
Dec 2025
A VC framework, not a protocol — but influential precisely because VC frameworks set funding priorities.
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C7
Ken Huang & Lisa Tan
Feb 2025
Springer's imprimatur is doing real work here: a venture bet becomes a citable foundation the moment it gets a peer-reviewed cover.
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C8
Xu et al.
Feb 2026
Xu et al. is the most complete statement of the Category C orthodoxy — and therefore the clearest target.
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C9
Nevermined
2026
Nevermined's hybrid settlement is pragmatic and also proves the point: the moment you need fiat, the blockchain stops being sufficient.
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C10
Bosch / IOTA / BearingPoint
2018–2025
The Bosch/IOTA project is the reminder that Category C was not invented in 2024 — it is an IoT idea that got a new reason to exist once the machines started to sound intelligent.
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C11
OKX
2026
OKX's framing is the interface argument: the agent speaks, the infrastructure translates.
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D3
a16z Crypto / YC / Medium
2025–2026
'Sovereign' is the loudest word in the corpus, and a16z uses it deliberately.
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D5
Antler VC
Jan 2026
Antler's report is the cleanest example of VC-produced taxonomy that reads like due diligence: the companies named are the companies funded.
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C13
Zetrix AI / CAICT's Astron
Apr 2026
Category-C now has a Chinese flag planted in it. The governance implications are louder than the technical ones.
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C14
Minghui Xu (arXiv 2602.14219)
Feb 2026
Xu writes down what every Ccr entry assumes out loud: no blockchain, no agency.
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E11
AIS-1 (ais-1.org)
Apr 2026
The first open-licensed identity standard that treats 'the agent' and 'the responsible party' as a single cryptographic object.
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Unstated 7
12% of corpus
B3
Sequoia Capital (Konstantine Buhler)
May 2025
Buhler's definition is the most ambitious in the corpus outside Category C, and it gives the whole structure away in one line: 'actually have their own economy.'
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D1
World Economic Forum
Jul 2025
WEF documents do not do taxonomy. They do vocabulary.
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D4
Macroeconomic doom loop (convergent)
2026
The doom loop is the definition that nobody wants to sign.
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D6
Argoz Consultants
Mar 2026
Argoz takes the most ambitious Category C language and strips out every implementation commitment, which is either diplomacy or intellectual hedging.
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E4
IEEE
2026 (Draft)
IEEE 7012 is the first formal standards body to treat agent-to-agent contracts as something requiring a standard rather than a whitepaper.
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E7
OECD
2026
What the OECD names, legislators regulate.
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E9
Urbach et al.
2021
Urbach et al. is the 2021 paper that defined the problem four years before the infrastructure could solve it.
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Hybrid 4
7% of corpus
D2
Bank for International Settlements (BIS)
2026
When the central bank of central banks analyzes agentic finance, it is a financial stability question, not a tech question.
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D7
MIT Technology Review (EmTech)
Nov 2025
The 'DNS of the agentic web' framing is the one that gets quoted, and the one that hides how much settlement design is being smuggled into a discovery protocol.
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E10
Goenka et al.
Jan 2026
TessPay is the academic version of the verification problem VCAP is standardizing, and the complementarity with reputation systems is exactly the kind of layering a mature Category C needs.
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D9
Nannini et al. (arXiv 2604.04604)
Apr 2026
The first operational answer to 'what does the EU AI Act actually require of agent providers' — four months before the deadline.
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Messaging 1
2% of corpus
B6
Vilnius University
Mar 2026
The Vilnius definition captures the intra-organizational layer of Category B — agents as a distributed workforce that coordinates with itself before it coordinates with humans.
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Database 1
2% of corpus
C12
BotNode / VMP-1.0
Mar 2026
One entry in a category of eleven — either a data point or a gap, and this paper reads it as a gap.
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