12 Predictions for 2026 | Tomasz Tunguz

Tunguz scored 7.85 out of 10 on his 2025 predictions and follows up with twelve for 2026, mostly about AI agents reshaping infrastructure, spending, and the web itself.

Reading notes

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• Businesses start paying more for AI agents than for people on rote tasks, following the pattern already seen with Waymo rides costing 31% more than Uber yet growing in demand.
• 2026 becomes a record liquidity year: SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, and Databricks IPO, some among the ten largest offerings ever, while fear of AI disruption drives over $25B in defensive acquisitions.
• Vector databases resurge as multimodal and world/state-space models need new data architectures connecting foundation models to enterprise data.
• Citing METR data on AI task duration doubling every 7 months, frontier models move from completing hour-long tasks to running 8+ hour autonomous workstreams by late 2026.
• AI budgets face scrutiny for the first time, pushing adoption of smaller, specialized, open-source models that get 10x cost reductions.
• Google pulls ahead by breadth rather than any single breakthrough, spanning frontier models, on-device inference, video generation, open-source weights, and search, forcing OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI to specialize.
• Engineering, security, and data observability converge into one discipline, a trend Tunguz says he flagged in his 2025 predictions.
• Stablecoins reach 30% of international payments by December, displacing SWIFT rails for a share of B2B volume as regulatory clarity improves.
• Agent query volume, an order of magnitude above human levels, forces a redesign of transactional and analytical database architecture.
• Data center buildout hits 3.5% of US GDP, a scale Tunguz compares to the historical railroad expansion, with private credit market strain as the main brake on further building.
• The web shifts to agent-first design: documentation and sites built for agentic research first, people second.
• The x402 protocol revives HTTP’s dormant 402 status code for real-time agent payments, and Cloudflare’s position in web infrastructure makes it the natural chokepoint, a concentration Tunguz expects to draw pushback from larger players.