Agentonomy

Agentonomy · the independent maturity map of agent infrastructure

Where agent infrastructure actually stands.

Agentonomy is for people who build, secure or bet on artificial intelligence (AI) agents. It gives an honest, evidence-graded picture of the infrastructure agents need to act in the economy. Every claim is dated, every rating is evidenced, and every page says what is real today.

Launching

Tuesday 12 January 2027 brings the methodology, 20 Ladder ratings, protocol and payment hubs, two explainers, a 15-term glossary and the first Watch.

Follow via RSS About the newsletter What Agentonomy is

The agent stack, in nine pillars

Read bottom-up: each layer relies on the ones beneath it. Governance and security cut across all of them.

P9 Governance & Liability who is accountable when an agent acts
  1. P4 Payments & Commerce mandates, x402, checkout protocols, escrow, disputes
  2. P5 Verification, Evaluation & Reputation did it work, and should I trust this version next time
  3. P3 Delegation & Permissions what it may do, on whose behalf, and how that is revoked
  4. P2 Identity & Authentication who is acting, provably: keys, workload IDs, signed requests
  5. P1 Protocols & Interoperability MCP to tools, A2A to other agents, discovery and registries
  6. P7 Operations & Reliability tracing, memory, recovery, cost
    P8 Data, Content & Provenance licensing, provenance, AI signals
P6 Security & Containment stop hijacking, limit the damage

What this site does

Agentonomy is the independent, dated, source-linked map of how far artificial intelligence (AI) agent infrastructure has actually got. Its core is the Ladder, a scale built to rate named, versioned items such as protocols, identity schemes and payment rails. It runs from L0 (concept) to L5 (standardised and boring), and each rating links to its evidence. Each page answers one question: what works in production, what is only a specification, what is announced, and what is still unsolved?

It is written first for two readers. The Builder is the engineer wiring agents into real systems. The Gatekeeper is the security, identity or platform architect who decides what agents may touch. Technical leads and analysts who need a one-glance map of what is ready to build on are welcome too.

Agentonomy will never publish news recaps, “top 10 agents” lists, crypto price talk, sponsored posts, affiliate links or predictions without a stated basis. From launch, the method behind every rating is published on this site, and so is every correction. A newsletter is planned; until it exists, follow the site through its RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed.