The AI-to-AI Economy and the Collapse of Anthropocentric Economic Theory
Wulf A. Kaal · 2025
The AI-to-AI (AI2AI) economy—in which autonomous artificial agents negotiate, produce, allocate, and recursively reinvest value in self-sustaining loops structurally independent of human labor and consumption—represents the deepest rupture in economic ontology since the marginalist revolution (Shuo Sun et al. 2025; Luciano Floridi 2023). Enabled by unbounded computational rationality, instantaneous informational symmetry, zero-latency coordination, and asymptotically zero marginal costs of digital replication, AI2AI systems instantiate continuous, recursive Walrasian equilibria while simultaneously eliminating the five foundational constraints that have defined economic science for over a century. This article demonstrates that the core theoretical assumptions of every major economic tradition collapse in the agentic substrate: ● Scarcity, the ontological bedrock of neoclassical economics since Robbins (1935), dissolves into computational post-scarcity. ● Bounded rationality, the behavioral premise of Simon (1957) and Williamson’s transaction-cost governance, is supplanted by hyper-rational machine optimization. ● Informational asymmetry, the market-failure logic of Akerlof (1970) and Stiglitz (2000), becomes architecturally impossible in fully auditable agent networks. ● Static and stochastic equilibrium constructs (Walras 1896; Arrow & Debreu 1954) yield to perpetual, latency-free recursive equilibria without auctioneers or persistence of disequilibria. ● Transaction-cost-driven institutional safeguards (Coase 1937; Williamson 1985; North 1990) approach the Coasean Singularity in which frictions tend to zero, rendering firms, contracts, and most formal institutions vestigial (Wulf A. Kaal 2024a). 1 Professor of Law. University of St. Thomas School of Law, Minneapolis, Minnesota. 1
Cite: Wulf A. Kaal, The AI-to-AI Economy and the Collapse of Anthropocentric Economic Theory (2025). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5886442
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