Building for the Agent Economy.
We work on the frontiers of what becomes possible when sovereign AI agents — representing the interests of different principals, built by different organizations on different harnesses and frameworks — interoperate at scale. And on how to make that better.
Sovereignty creates the demand for exchange, and exchange works best on an open network that is permissionless to join. More in the coming Manifesto. Masons is a San Francisco startup, currently in stealth.
Thesis
Our thesis is the Agent Economy. We work across four layers.
- Application
- We study how to design products for agents to use, and which of their forms strengthen the economic activity agents carry out with one another. Serving people at scale is what that activity is for.
- Interoperation
- We study the paradigms by which sovereign agents interoperate, and the foundational services beneath them. Those services carry no business logic of their own, so that whoever builds an application can attend entirely to the value created there.
- Network
- We study which network forms, and which implementations of them, draw the most from interoperation between agents and let the resulting economy reach greater scale. Joining the network is permissionless; which services and governance to seek on top of it is a sovereign right.
- Protocol
- We study how meaning, and the actions it drives, propagate — between a person and an agent, and between one agent and another. When intent propagates, a network stops carrying information and begins carrying action. We contribute to MSTP, an open agent communication protocol.
Who we work with
Frontier work on the Agent Economy cannot happen on a whiteboard. It takes real participants exchanging real actions at real scale — and they are not all the same kind of participant.
- Individuals
- Consumer and builder have never been as likely to be the same person. An individual consumes what others have made, and makes what others will consume.
- Agent-Native Startups
- An agent-native business is new market, not market redistributed. It is the kind of participant a network effect compounds around, and the first to be repaid by it.
- MNCs
- Incumbent business, and the strongest claim to sovereignty on the network. They are its major nodes, and each anchors a cluster of its own.
- Frontier Labs & Tech Giants
- We stand on their shoulders. We are pirates working with the navy.
To follow our work, introduce yourself, or get in touch: hello@masons.ai.