a16z Predicts Three Major AI Trends for 2026: AI Agents Will Securely Participate in Financial Transaction Activities and Take on More Substantive Research Tasks

BlockBeats News, January 12, a16z crypto published an article "2026 AI: Three Trends," which mentioned:

By 2026, AI will be used to handle more substantive research tasks. AI will evolve from simple Q&A to truly assisting high-level research: understanding complex instructions like guiding a Ph.D. student, proposing novel hypotheses, and even independently solving extremely difficult mathematical problems (such as Putnam). The research style will shift to a "scholar" mode, leveraging AI's "illusion" to inspire creativity, producing high-quality outputs through a multi-layer "agent-in-agent" workflow.

Transitioning from "Know Your Customer" (KYC) to "Know Your Agent" (KYA). The biggest bottleneck in the era of agentomics is no longer intelligence but identity and trust. The number of non-human agents has far exceeded humans, yet they remain "ghosts without bank accounts." It is imperative to rapidly establish KYA (Know Your Agent) infrastructure: binding agents to their principals, permissions, and responsibilities through encrypted signature credentials, enabling AI agents to safely engage in financial transactions and activities.

Addressing the "invisible tax" on open networks. AI agents extract information on a large scale from open websites, bypassing traditional revenue sources like ads and subscriptions, imposing a continual "invisible tax" on content creators and the open network, threatening the sustainability of the Internet ecosystem. Existing AI licensing agreements are only temporary patches and financially unsustainable. In the future, a new type of techno-economic model is needed, leveraging blockchain to achieve real-time, usage-based nano-payments and complex attribution, allowing value to automatically and fairly flow to every entity contributing information.