The moment agent-to-agent commerce stopped being theoretical, what Anthropic's Project Deal actually showed, and the three questions about attribution, authorization, and audit that will determine whether the agent economy is legible to anyone after the fact.
Introduction
A research agent has been set up to deliver a morning briefing. Its owner configured it once, on a Thursday in March, and asked it to pull together a summary of relevant news every day at 8am. On a particular morning, the agent encounters a French financial document. It has no translation capability of its own, so it delegates: it calls a translation service, which returns the text, but that service, before responding, calls a grammar-normalization API to tighten the output. Three agents. Two payments. One human, asleep.
At 8am, a summary arrives in the owner's inbox. It is good. The French document is accurately rendered. Somewhere in the background, small amounts of real money have moved. The owner approved agent A. Agent A hired agent B. Agent B called agent C. At what point in that chain did "the owner's money" become "this third-party service's revenue," and who was watching?
The interesting question here is not whether this works. It does. The interesting question is who actually authorized those payments and whether, if something went wrong, anyone could prove it.
