World's Fair 2026
The Agentic Web and the Bazaar Era of AI - Ramesh Raskar, MIT Media Lab
Overview
This talk introduces Project Nanda, an open research effort building the infrastructure for an internet of AI agents. It addresses the current limitations of agents being confined to proprietary platforms by proposing an open, decentralized architecture analogous to the early open web. The core idea is to enable agents from different entities to discover, communicate, and transact with each other permissionlessly.
Who should watch
- AI engineers building or deploying agents.
- Product Managers exploring agent-based product strategies.
- Builders seeking to understand agent interoperability and decentralized systems.
- Those concerned with agent identity, trust, and cross-platform coordination.
- Developers interested in open-source agent frameworks and infrastructure.
Key takeaways
- Project Nanda aims to create an open infrastructure for an internet of AI agents, similar to how the open web was built for documents.
- Current agents are often siloed within closed platforms, lacking shared discovery, portable identity, or open transaction capabilities.
- The Nanda index serves as a discovery layer, allowing agents to publish their capabilities and be found by others, going beyond simple DNS by including agent facts and capabilities.
- Agent facts are signed records that provide trustworthy information about an agent's identity, capabilities, and access permissions, enabling agents to verify each other before connecting.
- Nanda Town is an open-source simulation environment for testing and validating the agentic web infrastructure at scale, modeling discovery, identity, messaging, and coordination.
- Open-source, self-hosted agent gateways like Open Claw are crucial for giving users more control over their agents and their interactions.
- The proposed architecture includes layers for discovery (Nanda Index), commerce (portable identity and trust), and coordination, all tested within Nanda Town.
- Hosting agents can be done locally for control or on cloud platforms, with solutions like Maritime aiming to reduce the cost of running multiple agents.
Notable quotes
*Nanda, which stands for network AI agents in a decentralized architecture, is an open research building the infrastructure for an internet of AI agents, the way open web was built for documents.*
*The gap it fills is concrete. Agents have no shared way to find each other across vendors, no portable identity or trust that isn't owned by a single platform, and no open way to transact and coordinate across organizations.*
*The internet is about to host not millions or billions, but eventually trillions of autonomous agents. They negotiate, they delegate, they migrate between hosts in milliseconds.*
Unofficial community note. Prefer the recording for nuance.