How to read this guide
The agentic economy is a stack. Models at the bottom, agents built on them, platforms that run whole companies of agents, and the plumbing, chips and money underneath it all. Every name in the news belongs to one layer, and knowing which layer tells you most of what you need to know.
This guide gives each name one line: what it is, why it matters. Where a full WTF Agents guide exists, it is named so you can go deeper. Version numbers, valuations and star counts live in the dated box below and nowhere else, because they change monthly and the map does not.
By the numbers — September 2026
Layer 1 — The labs and their models
The brains. Everything above runs on one of these.
Anthropic — Claude — Safety-founded lab, now the most valuable private company on earth. Claude powers Claude Code, Cowork, Copilot Cowork, OpenClaw's default and Polsia's agents. Tiers: Fable, Opus, Sonnet, Haiku; Mythos is the restricted twin. Guides: WTF is Anthropic, WTF is Claude.
OpenAI — GPT — ChatGPT is still the product most people have used. GPT-6 arrived in September. OpenAI's agents are ChatGPT Work, Codex and the Agents API; its reach is its weapon.
Google DeepMind — Gemini — Gemini 3.8, Gemini Agent, Chrome Auto Browse and Jules. Owns Search, Android and Workspace, and invented the A2A protocol. Chose to consolidate its agents rather than launch a new one.
Meta — Muse — A new model family and a personal agent of the same name, delivered through WhatsApp and a standalone app with a free tier. Meta's bet is that three billion messaging users are the distribution. Also tried to buy Manus.
xAI — Grok — Elon Musk's lab, now inside SpaceX alongside Cursor. Grok Bot runs a team of agents sharing one cloud computer and its logins, coordinated by a "Chief of Staff."
Microsoft — Not a frontier lab of its own but the biggest distributor: Copilot Cowork, built on Claude, is live in Microsoft 365 worldwide; Copilot Studio hosts hundreds of thousands of custom agents; Foundry serves every major model.
DeepSeek — The Chinese lab whose cheap-to-train breakthrough in early 2025 made this a two-continent race. DeepSeek V4 is open-weight under the MIT licence and runs under a great many indie agents.
Alibaba — Qwen · Moonshot — Kimi · Zhipu — GLM · MiniMax — The rest of China's open-weight frontier. Kimi K3 was the largest open model ever released. Cheap, capable, downloadable. Guide: WTF is Happening with China's AI.
Mistral — France's lab. Efficient smaller models and Europe's answer to US and Chinese dependence.
Layer 2 — Work agents
Agents that do your job's tasks. The category every lab entered in 2026.
Cowork (Anthropic) — Claude working in your files, apps and its own browser, on desktop, web and phone. Included in every paid Claude plan. Guide: WTF is Cowork.
ChatGPT Work (OpenAI) — Give it an outcome; it returns finished spreadsheets, decks and web apps hours later. Launched July.
Copilot Cowork (Microsoft) — Cowork inside Microsoft 365, across Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and Excel. Built on Claude despite Microsoft's stake in OpenAI. Generally available since June.
Grok Bot (xAI) — A team of named agents sharing one cloud computer, working while you sleep. Launched August through Cursor's infrastructure.
Microsoft Scout — An always-on personal agent inside Copilot, in limited release.
Gemini Agent (Google) — Where Google's browser agent went after Project Mariner was folded in. Plus Auto Browse in Chrome.
Layer 3 — Coding agents
The category that proved agents work, and the one that made Anthropic.
Claude Code (Anthropic) — The autonomous developer. Terminal, desktop app, phone. The fastest-adopted developer tool of its generation. Guide: WTF is Claude Code.
Codex (OpenAI) — OpenAI's coding agent, now living inside the ChatGPT desktop app on GPT-6.
Devin (Cognition) — The original "AI software engineer," fully cloud-hosted, cut from $500 to $20 a month in April.
Jules (Google) — Google's free cloud coding agent on Gemini.
Cursor — The AI-first code editor, bought by SpaceX for $60 billion in June and now the delivery vehicle for Grok Bot. Losing OpenAI's models in November.
GitHub Copilot (Microsoft) — The largest install base in coding AI, evolving from autocomplete into an agent inside GitHub itself.
Layer 4 — Personal agents
Agents that run your life's admin, mostly over messaging apps.
OpenClaw — Open-source, self-hosted, millions of users, a non-profit foundation, native mobile apps. The reference personal agent and the one every rival is measured against. Guide: WTF is OpenClaw.
Meta Muse — Meta's consumer agent: books, buys, negotiates and fills in forms, free tier, WhatsApp. US only at launch. Guide: WTF is Meta Muse.
Hermes Agent (Nous Research) — The credible open-source number two: self-improving memory, hireable into Paperclip out of the box.
Manus — The Chinese general-purpose agent Meta agreed to buy for $2 billion before Beijing blocked the deal. Still independent, still Chinese.
Layer 5 — Company platforms and orchestration
Agents that run whole businesses, and the tools that manage teams of agents.
Polsia — The biggest and most argued-about: subscribe, describe an idea, a fixed team of agents builds and runs the company. Nearly half a million created; a founder who says one in ten has earned a dollar. Guide: WTF is Polsia.
NanoCorp — YC-backed rival that publishes the live revenue of every company on the platform — the most honest numbers in the space, and small ones: the best has earned $2,570, and only two have passed $1,000. Guide: WTF is NanoCorp.
Cofounder.co — Company-in-a-box with departments and a human approval gate in front of anything risky.
Paperclip — Open-source org chart for agents: roles, budgets, approvals, any agent vendor, self-hosted. ClipMart is its marketplace of forkable company templates. Guide: WTF is Paperclip.
Salesforce Agentforce — The enterprise incumbent's agent platform, priced per conversation, past a billion dollars in annual revenue.
ServiceNow AI Control Tower — Governed agents for IT and HR workflows; AI contract value past a billion dollars.
SAP Joule · Workday Illuminate — Agents inside the ERP and HR systems most large companies already run — and the first to charge outside agents a toll to reach their data.
Zapier · n8n · UiPath — The automation layer: connect apps, run defined workflows, now with agent steps. n8n is open-source; UiPath is the enterprise back-office specialist.
Layer 6 — The plumbing
Standards and infrastructure that make agents interoperate.
MCP — Model Context Protocol — The universal plug between agents and tools. Invented by Anthropic, adopted by everyone, now vendor-neutral. Guide: WTF is an API.
A2A — Agent2Agent — Google's standard for agents from different companies talking to each other. In production at hundreds of organisations.
Agentic AI Foundation — The Linux Foundation body that owns MCP and A2A, founded by Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Block. The rare case of rivals agreeing to share.
Stripe — The payment rails under Polsia companies, the WTF Agents store, and most of the agentic commerce experiments. Agents that can pay run through Stripe.
Cloudflare · Vercel — Where agents are hosted and deployed. Vercel's Eve is a framework for durable agents; Cloudflare's platform runs them at the edge.
Layer 7 — The picks and shovels
Who gets paid regardless of which agent wins.
Nvidia — The chips. Every model in Layer 1 was trained and is served on Nvidia hardware, which is why it is the most valuable company in the world. Buying Hugging Face for $12.93 billion extends it from the silicon to the shelf the models sit on.
AWS · Google Cloud · Microsoft Azure — The clouds. Bedrock, Vertex AI and Foundry serve every major model to enterprises inside infrastructure they already pay for. Amazon and Google are also Anthropic's largest backers.
Hugging Face — The hub where open-weight models are published and downloaded. If DeepSeek or Qwen ships a model, this is where it lands. Nvidia agreed to buy it in September 2026 for $12.93 billion, closing in the first half of 2027; it has promised the platform stays open and chip-neutral.
GitHub — Where the code lives and where agents commit it. OpenClaw and Paperclip's star counts are GitHub's.
Guide: The Picks and Shovels goes deeper on this layer.
The people
Six names that come up more than any others.
Dario Amodei — CEO of Anthropic. The essays that set the tone for the safety-first case.
Sam Altman — CEO of OpenAI. The face of ChatGPT and the reach strategy.
Elon Musk — SpaceX, xAI, Cursor, Grok Bot. Consolidating the agent stack under one company.
Mark Zuckerberg — Meta. Muse is his second attempt at an AI reset, and the first with a real agent.
Peter Steinberger — Created OpenClaw, joined OpenAI, left the project to a foundation.
Ben Broca (Ben Cera) — Solo founder of Polsia. Raised $30 million with one employee and said out loud that most of his customers' companies earn nothing.
How the layers fit together
Value has moved down the stack. In 2024 the money was in models. In 2026 it is in agents. The bet behind Layer 5 is that next it will be in companies that no human works at.
Two forces cut across every layer. The first is Claude's spread: Anthropic's model sits under products from Microsoft, OpenClaw, Polsia and Paperclip, which is why one lab is close to a trillion dollars. The second is China's open weights: cheap, capable, downloadable models that let a solo builder run agents for pennies and give every US lab a price ceiling.
When a new name appears in your feed, ask which layer it belongs to. The answer usually tells you who it competes with, who it depends on, and whether it is a product or a press release.
Glossary
- Layer
- A level of the agentic economy stack: models, agents, platforms, plumbing, infrastructure. Every company in this guide belongs to one, sometimes two.
- Frontier lab
- A company training models at the leading edge of capability: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, xAI, DeepSeek.
- Work agent
- An agent that does your job's tasks: Cowork, ChatGPT Work, Grok Bot, Copilot Cowork.
- Personal agent
- An agent that runs your life's admin: OpenClaw, Muse, Hermes.
- Company platform
- A service where agents build and run a whole business: Polsia, NanoCorp, Cofounder.co.
- Orchestration
- Managing a team of agents: Paperclip.
- Open weights
- A model anyone can download and run. Most Chinese frontier models; few US ones.
- MCP / A2A
- The two open standards that let agents use tools and talk to each other. Both under the Agentic AI Foundation.
- Incumbent
- An established enterprise software vendor adding agents to what it already sells: Salesforce, ServiceNow, SAP, Workday, Microsoft.
This is the map. Every name on it with a guide has one waiting.