# Agents Over Bubbles

> In Agents Over Bubbles, Stratechery's Ben Thompson pushes back on the idea that AI is a bubble about to pop. His frame is that large language models have gone through three paradigm shifts, from the ChatGPT chatbot, to reasoning models like o1, to today's agents that operate autonomously, and that the third shift is the one skeptics are underrating. The core of his argument is about demand. Agents do not make a single call and stop, they direct models repeatedly, invoke tools, verify their own results, and run continuously, which means they consume far more compute than a chat session ever did. That, he contends, is why the enormous infrastructure spending is grounded in real usage rather than hype. He points to Claude Code with Opus 4.5 as an example of capabilities that arrived faster than expected. His conclusion is nuanced and worth sitting with. Thompson expects the underlying models to commoditize, but he argues the integration of a model with a well-built agent harness is where durable advantage lives, giving companies like OpenAI and Anthropic a defensible edge even in a crowded market.

_Section: [Interesting AI Articles](https://www.wortins.com/articles) · Source: Stratechery · Published Sunday, September 6, 2026_

## Wortins' read

In Agents Over Bubbles, Stratechery's Ben Thompson pushes back on the idea that AI is a bubble about to pop. His frame is that large language models have gone through three paradigm shifts, from the ChatGPT chatbot, to reasoning models like o1, to today's agents that operate autonomously, and that the third shift is the one skeptics are underrating. The core of his argument is about demand. Agents do not make a single call and stop, they direct models repeatedly, invoke tools, verify their own results, and run continuously, which means they consume far more compute than a chat session ever did. That, he contends, is why the enormous infrastructure spending is grounded in real usage rather than hype. He points to Claude Code with Opus 4.5 as an example of capabilities that arrived faster than expected. His conclusion is nuanced and worth sitting with. Thompson expects the underlying models to commoditize, but he argues the integration of a model with a well-built agent harness is where durable advantage lives, giving companies like OpenAI and Anthropic a defensible edge even in a crowded market.

## Source

[Read the full story at Stratechery](https://stratechery.com/2026/agents-over-bubbles/)

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