The State of AI Agents in 2026: $211B VC Funding, 92% Drop in Inference Costs (meditations.metavert.io)

A recent analysis on the future of AI agents highlights a transformative shift towards a Creator Era, characterized by significant advancements and vulnerabilities in AI technology. In 2025, venture capital funding for AI soared to $211 billion, constituting half of all global VC investments. Despite this financial influx, only 6% of organizations reported substantial EBIT impacts from AI, indicating a gap in effectively translating AI capabilities into measurable business value. However, the study notes dramatic improvements in AI performance: inference costs plummeted by 92% within three years, enabling agentic workflows to be economically feasible for a wider range of applications. Models like Claude Opus 4.6 are not only achieving performance levels surpassing human benchmarks in complex tasks but also sustaining autonomous work for extended periods, suggesting a redefinition of productivity. This research also cautions about the increasing prevalence of AI agents within organizations—144 non-human identities for every human employee, leading to governance challenges. As AI agents begin to dominate content creation and software development, traditional economic models, particularly those reliant on human-driven user engagement, face disruption. The convergence of composable networks and autonomous functionality could revolutionize the tech landscape, yet poses profound risks concerning reliability and accountability. The gap between AI capabilities and governance mechanisms poses a critical risk, underscoring the necessity for robust frameworks to manage this rapidly evolving technology.