Cathie Wood: Investors should start paying attention to where AI agents 'spend money'

BlockBeats news, October 3 — ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood said that as AI agents gradually shift from answering questions to executing tasks on behalf of users and actually spending money, investors may in the future need to move from "tracking developers" to "tracking AI agents," observing which software, services, and financial networks they choose.

Speaking at the Robinhood Summit, Wood said: "We may increasingly talk about 'tracking agents.'" She believes that if millions of AI agents in the future can autonomously decide which tools and services to use, their actual activity could become a new indicator for observing technological demand and capital flows.

This trend is also driving the development of "Agentic Finance." SharpLink co-CEO and former BlackRock digital assets head Joseph Chalom said that AI agents need controllable, revocable, and traceable payment permissions. For example, users can authorize an agent to spend up to $500 to book a hotel, while retaining the ability to revoke permission at any time and view transaction records.

Chalom believes that open blockchains such as Ethereum may become a shared financial network for different AI agents, applications, and enterprises, enabling AI agents to complete payments without a single bank or tech company acting as an intermediary. BlackRock has also previously pointed out that AI agents may in the future use stablecoins to pay for API calls, data, and computing power, among other costs.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong previously said that Grok is currently one of the main clients for "agent traders" on Coinbase, but did not disclose specific trading data. At the same time, companies such as Stripe, Visa, Google, and OpenAI are also developing AI agent payment solutions, and competition between traditional payment networks and blockchains is accelerating.