“The immediate catalyst is OpenClaw,” Nick Patience, AI lead at the Futurum Group, told CNBC. “The open source agent demonstrated a genuine appetite for AI that acts rather than just gives answers.”

Competitive pressure is the visible driver, but there’s a “deeper logic,” he added. “Agents represent the point at which AI platforms shift from cost centres to revenue infrastructure, whether through commerce, advertising or enterprise productivity.” 

For tech companies like Google and Meta, which both have large advertising and ecommerce businesses, agents that conduct transactions could be a “major value driver,” said Malik Ahmed Khan, senior analyst at Morningstar. 

Ultimately, Big Tech companies see AI agents as a way to boost user subscriptions and retain platform control, Gartner Analyst Arun Chandrasekaran told me.

“Agents can create more engagement, utility and lock-in customers on their platforms due to the ability to deliver more tangible value,” he said. “Also, agents have higher stickiness due to the continuing learning and user context they gain over a period.”

But security and governance around AI agents is still a work in progress. In February, a Meta employee went viral after posting about OpenClaw deleting a large amount of emails of its own volition. 

Then there’s the trust problem and how enterprises can manage the risk of an AI agent doing the wrong thing.

“The shift from AI systems that say the wrong thing to AI systems that do the wrong thing is a qualitatively different risk management challenge,” said Patience. “Most enterprises, and arguably most vendors, aren’t yet equipped to handle it at scale.”

Regardless, AI agents are set to continue to dominate analyst chat. AMD CEO Lisa Su told CNBC earlier this week that agents were driving huge demand in the AI cycle. 

“Agentic development is not a side project; it is the theme of their 2026 roadmaps and represents a pivot from search to action,” said Craig Le Clair, principal analyst at Forrester.

Competition between Big Tech, frontier model companies, incumbent software vendors and new startups is only going to ramp up as companies race to build out money-making AI tools, Arjun Bhatia, co-head of tech equity research at William Blair, told me.

“The agentic wars are well under way,” he added.

The EU is considering rules that would restrict its member governments’ use of U.S. cloud providers to handle sensitive data, sources familiar with the talks told CNBC.

Anthropic’s revenue and usage increased 80-fold in the first quarter on an annualized basis, according to CEO Dario Amodei.

Apple is spending more than 10 cents of every dollar it brings in on R&D for the first time in at least 30 years.

Samsung hit a $1 trillion market cap following record first-quarter earnings.

Nintendo will hike the retail price of the Switch 2 after forecasting a decline in sales for its flagship console as the memory chip crunch hits the Japanese gaming giant.

SoftBank recorded it’s best day since 2020 earlier this week, with shares soaring 18%, amid a broader tech-fueled rally that saw Japan’s Nikkei 225 surge to record highs. The company’s gains were amplified by its close ties to Arm and AI lab OpenAI, said one commentator.