Table of contents
Chapter 5
PAID
24 min readAgent-on-Agent Commerce - The Honest Version
What works today, what's marketing, and what the next 12 months look like.
Anthropic Project Deal, Cloudflare Mesh, Cisco Agentic Workforce Identity, Okta for AI Agents - the agent-on-agent stack is real. Here's what actually ships in 2026 vs what's vendor positioning, and what an honest /api/quote agent contract looks like.
outlined
Full chapter in progressWhat this chapter covers
- 01Who's shipping what, as of mid-2026
- 02The three-layer identity pattern: directory · cryptographic ID · per-call authz
- 03Capability leases revisited - Okta NHI + Cisco AWI
- 04Designing an /api/quote endpoint that a buyer-agent can use
- 05Failure modes: when the agent-on-agent path is worse than human-in-the-loop
- 06What's vendor marketing and what's actually production-ready