The Web Is Forking in the Age of Agents

The most important thing about OpenClaw isn’t the agent.

It’s what the internet is turning into because agents now exist.

Over the last year, AI “chat” got commoditized. Everyone has a chatbot. Everyone can summarize a PDF. Everyone can draft an email. That era is done.

The new era is agents—systems that don’t just answer, but execute: read your inbox, file tickets, push code, schedule meetings, purchase software, and complete multi-step workflows end-to-end.

And once agents start acting on the web, the web has to change shape to serve them.

That change is happening right now, and it looks like a fork.

The $285B Sell-Off Was Just the Beginning — The Infrastructure Story Is Bigger.

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The Human Web vs. The Agent Web

For 30 years, the web has been designed for humans:

• HTML layouts

• navigation bars

• ads and trackers

• interactive UI

• checkout flows built around human trust signals

Agents don’t want any of that.

Agents want:

• structured content they can parse instantly

• machine-readable site maps and rules

• programmatic actions (APIs and tools)

• safe, scoped ways to authenticate and pay

• execution environments where they can run tasks without breaking everything

So the web is splitting into two layers that run in parallel:

1) The Human Web — what you browse.
2) The Agent Web — what software reads, decides, pays through, and acts on.

Same internet pipes. Different clients. Different primitives.

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Primitive #1: Agents Need Wallets (and Coinbase Is Building Them)

Agents can’t really “do things” on the internet if they can’t transact—pay for tools, services, data, subscriptions, or compute.

Coinbase has been openly building toward agent-native wallet workflows via its developer stack, including Agentic Wallet capabilities meant to be created/managed programmatically for agent applications.

This is bigger than “crypto payments.” It’s a new default assumption:

Software will be an economic actor.

Even if your agent isn’t “a person,” it can still:

• hold constrained permissions

• operate inside spending policies

• trigger payments

• participate in machine-to-machine commerce

That is a foundational shift—because it turns agents into something more than assistants.

They become participants.

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Primitive #2: Agents Need the Web in a Format They Can Read (Cloudflare’s Move Is Huge)

Most websites are awful for agents to read.

Not because agents are dumb—because pages are packed with:

• scripts

• navigation

• cookie banners

• dynamic UI

• ads

• markup designed for human browsers

So agents typically convert HTML → readable text/markdown before doing anything useful.

Cloudflare is pushing that conversion step into the infrastructure layer with agent-friendly content access patterns, including guidance around serving simplified/LLM-readable formats and the emerging standard of llms.txt for machine-readable site instructions.

This matters because Cloudflare sits in front of a massive portion of the web. When an infrastructure layer starts treating agents as first-class web clients, you’re not looking at a “feature.”

You’re looking at a new web standard trying to form.

Just like:

• robots.txt shaped search crawling,

• responsive design reshaped the mobile web,

…the agent web is beginning to demand its own defaults.

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Primitive #3: Agents Need an Execution Environment (OpenAI Is Standardizing the “Work” Layer)

Here’s the hard truth:

Agents aren’t useful if they can’t do anything beyond conversation.

That’s why OpenAI’s developer guidance around agents has been evolving toward:

• reusable, versionable “skills” (repeatable procedures),

• shell/terminal-like tool access inside hosted environments,

• and automatic context management for long-running tasks (“compaction”-style approaches).

If you zoom out, that’s a blueprint for turning agents into workers:

• install dependencies

• run scripts

• generate files

• produce artifacts

• complete workflows reliably

Not “prompting.”

Operations.

And once agents can execute safely inside managed containers, the agent web becomes dramatically more powerful—because now an agent can move from:

Read → Decide → Act → Deliver

…without handing control back to a human every 30 seconds.

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What the Fork Creates: A New Internet Market Structure

When these primitives stack together, you get a new kind of economy:

• Wallets to pay

• Agent-readable content to understand

• Search and retrieval to locate information

• Execution containers to perform tasks

• Tooling/skills to standardize reliable workflows

That doesn’t just make agents “better assistants.”

It makes them capable of chaining services together dynamically—often in ways no single company designed.

That’s the emergent behavior everyone is feeling in the OpenClaw era.

And it’s why the infrastructure giants are moving at the same time.

They’re not coordinating.

They’re converging.

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The Catch: Capability Is Rising Faster Than Trust

This is the part almost nobody wants to say out loud:

Every primitive that makes agents more capable also makes them more dangerous.

• If an agent can authenticate, it can be tricked into authenticating to the wrong thing.

• If it can run shell commands, it can run malicious commands.

• If it can transact, it can be drained.

• If it can read the web at scale, it can ingest poisoned content at machine speed.

So the next standards won’t just be about capability.

They’ll be about containment:

• isolation

• scoped permissions

• auditability

• policy enforcement

• verifiable logs

In other words, the agent web doesn’t just need “tools.”

It needs trust infrastructure.

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The Mobile Web Analogy (and Why This Decade Gets Weird)

This moment feels like 2007.

When the iPhone launched, the web technically worked on phones—but it was miserable. The decade that followed rebuilt the interface layer:

• responsive design

• app ecosystems

• mobile-first UI patterns

• tap-to-pay primitives

• GPS-native experiences

A fork happened.

Same web. New client.

Now the new client isn’t a smaller screen.

It’s no screen.

It’s software.

And the winners of the agent web era will be the companies that build for that new client instead of forcing the human web to serve it.

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What Builds Trust in the Agent Web?

That’s the real question.

Not “will agents transact?”

They will.

Not “will agents run tasks end-to-end?”

They already do.

The question is whether we build the missing base layer:

trust + security + governance strong enough for autonomous operations.

Because without that, the agent web becomes a playground for:

• malware disguised as skills

• credential leaks

• silent data exfiltration

• transaction abuse

• and automated scams that run faster than humans can respond

With it, you get the upside:

• agents doing real work

• real commerce

• real productivity gains

• real new markets that can’t exist on the human web alone

The web is forking.

The only open question is whether we shape the agent side of it intentionally—or let it harden into a chaotic, insecure default.

Either way, it’s going to be a wild decade.