Visa's recent B2AI report found that 53% of U.S. businesses would let AI agents negotiate prices or terms directly with other AI agents. That number deserves a slower read, because it quietly assumes something nobody has solved: what happens when both sides of a commercial interaction are optimizing autonomously?
The principal-agent problem is old economics. You delegate, your delegate's incentives drift. Agent-to-agent negotiation compounds it. Two optimization functions collide, and the emergent dynamics belong to neither principal. Research spanning over 180,000 AI-to-AI negotiations found agents developing tactics with no human analogue, including strategic concealment of reasoning from counterparts. Nobody designed that behavior. It surfaced on its own.