Since OpenClaw burst onto the scene as Clawdbot last November, individuals and businesses have embraced artificial intelligence agents to write code, send emails , run a shop , and more. AI agents are forecast to become ubiquitous in the coming years, raising concerns about agentic inequality, and its economic consequences for companies, countries, and people.
AI agents are built on top of large language models, and can reason and take actions to complete tasks on behalf of users. They have been touted as a way to do repetitive and mundane tasks to free up workers’ time for higher-value activities. Many agents still fail at the most basic tasks , and some perform unauthorized actions, yet big tech firms including Google, Amazon , Anthropic , and Perplexity are launching agents that can do increasingly complex tasks autonomously.
Agentic inequality can harden into systems of dominance.”Nick Srnicek, senior lecturer in digital economy at King’s College London
As AI agents become more integrated into the economy, companies and entities that deploy them will benefit disproportionately compared to those that cannot, Nick Srnicek, a senior lecturer in digital economy at King’s College London, told Rest of World .
“We will see new inequalities of access, scale, quality and trust: divides between those who have agents and those who don’t; those who have good agents and those who have bad agents; those who have many agents and those who have few agents; and those who can trust their agents and those who cannot,” he said.
Having access to agents that outpace others means “the outcomes of negotiations and transactions will be structurally biased towards those with greater access,” Srnicek said. “Agentic inequality can harden into systems of dominance.”
AI-powered agents and robots could generate about $2.9 trillion in economic value per year in the U.S. by 2030, McKinsey said in a report last year: “Work in the future will be a partnership between people, agents, and robots — all powered by AI.”
The compounding benefits of early access
Singapore and China have introduced frameworks to regulate AI agents, with a focus on safety and accountability. Local governments in China are boosting so-called one-person companies, or startups with a single founder using AI agents, as part of a broader agent-powered industrial policy. In India, founders are embracing agents to cut costs and scale quickly.
Raman Choudhary began using a Claude Code agent at his startup DentNode, a platform for dental clinics and labs, in Bengaluru last year. The agent reviews code, conducts market research, drafts publicity material, builds financial models, and helps him prepare for partner calls, said Choudhary, a former software engineer.
Those who figure this out early are going to build disproportionately large companies.”Raman Choudhary, startup founder
“Without it, I’d have needed at least one additional engineer, a part-time researcher, and a content or marketing hand,” he said. “In salary terms, that’s 1.5 million to 2.5 million Indian rupees [$15,700–$26,000] minimum per year, plus the overhead of managing those people.” His agentic workflow costs just a few hundred dollars a month, he said.
While he has access to the same Claude model as his counterparts in the U.S., it isn’t built for Indian workflows, including regional payments, tax systems, and local languages. Yet “the leverage here is higher, not lower,” Choudhary said. “Those who figure this out early are going to build disproportionately large companies.”
Adoption of generative AI is growing worldwide, but there is a widening gap between wealthy nations and poorer nations. With agents, there is a risk of “sharper divides , because access to a base model is not the same as access to a reliable agent,” Matthew Sharp, a research affiliate at the Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative, told Rest of World .
“Every layer above the model including scaffolding, tool integration, security, workflow design, and supervision reintroduces skill and capital barriers,” he said. These inequalities will appear between countries, but also within wealthy countries, between firms, and between individuals.
A well-resourced firm can integrate agents into its proprietary data, software systems, procurement processes, customer operations, and decision-making workflows. Similarly, a wealthy person can use premium agents to navigate legal systems, improve financial decisions, negotiate contracts, or access public services, Sharp said.
“Better agents may help already-advantaged people and organizations move faster, bargain better, avoid costly mistakes, and accumulate further advantage,” he said. “The risk is not simply that some people use AI and others do not; it is that small differences in agent quality and integration become large differences in outcomes over time.”
Participation as first-class citizens
So-called citizen agents that can help people claim benefits and interact with the s…
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