🟣 The Agent Economy Is Running Into a More Practical Question: Who Has the Authority to Act? Amazon recently blocked Meta’s Muse AI Agent from continuing to shop on its platform. The notice shown to users was direct: “continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon’s Conditions of Use” Amazon also raised security and privacy concerns around the Agent not clearly identifying itself while browsing. This is an important signal for the Agent economy. Until now, much of the industry has focused on questions such as: Can an Agent understand a task? Can it call tools? Can it make payments? Platforms are now beginning to ask a different set of questions: Who is this Agent? Who authorized it? What permissions does it have? Which services can it access? Can that authority be verified by another machine? This is why identity, permissions, and verification are becoming increasingly important parts of Agent infrastructure. For Nikola, this connects directly to the broader infrastructure thesis. Nikola is not only focused on giving Agents access to models, compute, data, and tools. As Agents begin executing tasks across platforms and participating in real economic activity, the infrastructure around them also needs to support identity, permissions, execution records, and verifiable outcomes. What happened between Amazon and Meta is an early example of a much larger problem. The future internet cannot only understand that a request was made. It also needs to understand which Agent made it, who authorized that Agent, and what that Agent was permitted to do. Capability gives an Agent the ability to act. Verifiable authority gives the rest of the economy a reason to accept that action. This is becoming one of the next major infrastructure problems for the Agent economy.