Open agent economy infrastructure

Seth Lazar is Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University and founding director of the Machine Intelligence and Normative Theory Lab. He is also a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI, a Carnegie Endowment fellow, and a Senior AI Advisor to the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia. His research focuses on the political philosophy of AI, with recent published work on the political economy of data and AI and on the governance of AI systems by other AI systems.

The grant funds scoping work on what Lazar calls the "agent economy": the emerging space of user-to-agent and agent-to-agent interactions as language models start mediating commerce, information access, and institutional procedures. His MINT Lab research questions ask what institutions and protocol-level infrastructure are needed to prevent an era of "platform agents" where a small number of providers capture most agent traffic, in the same way that a small number of platforms captured most web and mobile traffic. The 2025 preprint "Infrastructure for AI Agents," coauthored with Alan Chan, Markus Anderljung, and others, sets out three required infrastructure functions: attributing actions to specific agents and users, shaping interactions between agents, and detecting and remedying harms.

The grant falls in the Cosmos fast-grant range of $1K to $10K, announced December 17, 2024. It sits at the agents, protocols, and sovereignty-decentralization cross-layers of the open stack: the work is about who owns and governs the rails that future agent traffic will run on, and whether those rails are open or captured. It complements other awards in the same cohort that center decentralization and autonomy as design constraints rather than afterthoughts.