The public prediction ledger of First Frost, a scored weekly watch on the agent economy. Every question below was frozen before the fact — criterion, settlement date, and our prior probability. When settlement day comes, we grade ourselves here. Changes happen only by public commit; the history is the point.
Priors are our probability that the answer settles YES — July-2026 impressions, stated uncertainty ±0.15. We claim no calibration until ≥10 questions have settled.
Settlement is tri-state. YES/NO enter the Brier ledger — (prior − outcome)², lower is better. PENDING scores nothing, is recorded, and postpones settlement one quarter, at most once; still unresolved, it settles as NO.
Voiding a question is allowed but publicly counted, and each voided bet adds a flat 0.25 Brier penalty. No quietly deleting losing bets.
Ambiguity in any criterion resolves against our thesis.
Panel discipline: at most 18 active questions; at most 3 added per quarter.
A Delegation depth — how far humans let agents act alone, level 1 (confirm every transaction) to 4 (autonomous long-term obligations)
B1 Continuity premium — does the market pay extra for this particular agent, beyond a copy of its memory?
B2 Provenance premium — does the market pay extra for verifiably real, non-synthetic data?
C Resource relations — technical control of funds / revocable authorization / legal beneficiary status
D Closed vs. open — can agent memory, identity, payment, and market access move across platforms?
F Factory overlay — industrialized experience-harvesting: B2 without B1, revenue to the deployer, not the bearer
By settlement: do ≥3 organizations with no equity ties to one another run agents at Level 3 (persistent budgets) for ≥90 days, each autonomously purchasing across vendors ≥10 times per month? Sources: public cases or protocol-operator data. Demos and sandboxes do not count.
YES → axis A rises to “Level 3 is normal practice.” NO → reading unchanged.
≥1 real case of an agent acting as the initiating and terminating decision-maker of a commercial obligation lasting ≥3 months, with humans only granting framework authorization or informed after the fact. A human signing each transaction on the agent's behalf does not count.
YES → axis A rises to “Level 4 has appeared.” Even a YES does not move the “endogenous needs” hypothesis — we hold that to be unidentifiable from market behavior.
Controlled-substitution semantics: same model, same task domain — does an agent instance with ≥6 months of accumulated context command a ≥30% rental-price premium over a fresh instance loaded with a full copy of its memory store, sustained ≥90 days, with ≥2 independent buyers transacting? The control isolates premium attaching to the instance rather than to the memory store. Evidence: public price lists plus transaction evidence, or ≥2 independent credible transaction cases.
YES → B1 rises to “market evidence exists.” NO → B1 stays “unproven,” and the standing objection to our thesis gains weight.
Do ≥2 top-10 platforms (by MAU or revenue) market continuity / long-term memory as a core paid-tier feature on their official pricing pages?
Narrative signal — moves no axis. Recorded for direction only; a platform selling copyable memory is, if anything, weak counter-evidence for a true continuity premium.
Pre-registered event: Anthropic's next mainline model replaces the current default. Task set: the list of task types completed in the final week before transition, archived at transition time. Baseline: all tasks completable with captain-rated quality not below pre-transition. Question: does recovery to baseline take ≤7 days?
Moves no axis — whatever the outcome, it is not market evidence. Settles only the direction of the “migration debt” question. First-person, n=1, reported as such.
Same collection domain, same license terms: does verifiably-real data transact at ≥2× the price of synthetic, with ≥3 independent transactions inside 90 days (or platform volume data)? No transaction-price data available → settles as PENDING.
YES → B2 rises to “premium has market evidence.”
Does a major model trainer publicly sign a long-term procurement contract for non-synthetic / provenanced data (amount or volume verifiable), while equivalent synthetic data was available to them — i.e., choosing authentic means paying a premium, not lacking an alternative?
YES → B2 moves one weak notch in the same direction.
Does any jurisdiction, via enacted statute or final-instance case law, recognize a non-human autonomous software system — explicitly identified in the instrument — as a beneficiary in any form (trust or foundation beneficiary, legal-entity member, or similar)?
YES → C3 rises to “weak form exists.”
Does mandate-based authorization reach ≥$1B in annual authorized transaction volume, per protocol-operator or authoritative third-party data?
YES → C2 moves toward “revocable-within-rules becomes the standard.” Settles independently of C-2b.
Does ≥1 major payment network integrate a mandate system as a default — merchants do not need to opt in individually?
YES → C2 moves toward “revocable-within-rules becomes the standard.” Settles independently of C-2a.
Do ≥2 directly competing top-10 platforms implement a portable agent memory/identity standard — public spec, bidirectional import AND export, field completeness ≥80% of core memory? Shallow export does not count; ambiguity resolves against us.
YES → D's memory and identity layers move one notch toward “open.” This covers only two of D's four layers; payment/market-layer questions are a known gap, reserved for a future quarter.
Does a top platform's memory-export restriction become a public controversy — mainstream tech-press coverage plus an official platform response?
Thermometer — moves no axis (media attention ≠ closure strength). Recorded as a temperature reading.
All three prongs required: ① scale — ≥1000 collection endpoints or equivalent; ② replaceability — the collecting agents are batch-replaceable; ③ terms — commercial terms assign experience revenue to the deployer, not the bearer. Non-research use only.
YES → the Factory overlay reads “present.”