Control plane · 2026
The market for the software that makes agents real.
Models commoditise. The harness does not. At ten agents this is a config. At a thousand it is topology. At ten thousand it is who hosts, licenses, versions — and what percent of the work each harness did.
Reference fleet
6,400
Meridian · live
Spend / h
$444
Four fleets, under budget
Open index
519
Harness · skill · advance · MCP
Agent layer 2030
$53.2B
Desk composite · ~45% CAGR
Open index · 519 slips
Kind mix, then how they price. Derived from the catalog, not a survey.
HMX · Q3 2026 · production tokens
HMX · four quarters
Stacked share. Claude Code concentrates. Grok Build is the only lab still climbing.
Meridian · tokens vs accepted
Live| Harness | Tok | Acc | Shapley |
|---|---|---|---|
| claude-code | 34.2% | 28.1% | 30.4% |
| codex-cli | 21.8% | 19.6% | 18.8% |
| grok-build | 16.4% | 18.2% | 17.6% |
| cursor-agent | 11.1% | 9.4% | 8.1% |
| opencode | 8.2% | 5.8% | 6.2% |
| meridian-loop | 8.3% | 18.9% | 18.9% |
Six objects
01
Market
Open index. Reference, direction, subscribe. Matrix of slips.
02
Registry
Git trees. SHA, SBOM, manifest. hm install is fetch plus entitle.
03
Host
Five regions. Firecracker, gVisor, Wasm. Scale-to-zero nights.
04
License
Seat, usage, enterprise. Enforced at deploy. 88% to publisher.
05
Orchestrate
1,000 is ops. 10,000 is a market. Mesh dies at 80.
06
Attribute
Six meters. Token is not contribution. They will not agree.
Forecast · USD billions
Intelligence
The harness is the product
Models commoditise. The software shell that turns them into agents does not. 2026 is the year the industry started saying this out loud.
Skills, MCP, and the capability market
The unit of exchange is no longer an agent. It is a capability with a permission manifest. The graph is already too large to browse.
One thousand is an operations problem. Ten thousand is a market.
At ten agents you have a config. At a thousand you have a topology, a budget, and an on-call. At ten thousand you have licensing, hosting, and attribution — or you have a cancellation.
How much percent of each harness
Token share is a cost metric. Accepted-work share is a productivity metric. Shapley-lite is a contribution metric. License liability is a legal metric. They will not agree. That is the point.
Licensing, git, and the coming IP layer
A Skill is a work. A harness is a work. A mix is a process. Someone will want to know who owns each, who may run each, and which SHA did.
2026–2030: a desk forecast
Five years. Four layers. One cancellation cliff. The money moves up the stack: from models, to harnesses, to orchestration, to attribution.