Do AI Agents Make Money in 2026? Or Is It Just Mac Minis and Vibes?

https://www.siliconsnark.com/do-ai-agents-actually-make-money-in-2026-or-is-it-just-mac-minis-and-vibes/

by SaaSasaurus • 5 months ago

35 41 5 months ago

pavelstoev• 5 months ago

Yes, for example, if you are a seller on the Shopify Platform. Lookup Shopify SimGym, and Javier Moreno's tech blog about it.

df2dfs2• 5 months ago

https://apps.shopify.com/simgym

2.7 stars and 3 ratings?

anonymous9082132• 5 months ago

Shopify SimGym, and Javier Moreno's tech blog about it

The embodiment of what our industry is becoming. A spambot-generated article about a service selling you spambots to visit your storefront, which has literally negative real world utility. There is zero indication that this thing has made any money. It's also completely unrelated to the topic at hand, which is specifically about OpenClaw and the viral marketing trend of people buying Mac Minis as a platform to run their own spambot wrapper. For bonus points, that article is also spambot-generated. There is already a spambot comment in the thread from an obvious spam account with hundreds of upvotes that was already nuked once before but went back to spamming. Marvelous. What wonderful technology we've built.

df2dfs2• 5 months ago

I very much believe something profound has happened in the era of ultra-convenience and social media etc. Its damaged the psyche of humans and the way they think. Invention and innovation will become less prevalant due to this.

tonyoconnell• 5 months ago

I've been thinking a lot about what AI agents buy, and what can I sell to them. If you are the owner of an agent that has a wallet can you share what it has bought or sold?

BrokenCogs• 5 months ago

You can sell them and their owners shady crypto

hsuduebc2• 5 months ago

Well you need to over hype something else if crypto, nfts, web3, dropshipping or generating of garbage ebooks didn't get any attention now.

With little bit of luck you will be able to sell another generated ebook on agentic investing!

polyomino• 5 months ago

Everyone knows the real money is in AI generated articles about AI

jombib• 5 months ago

Yeah feels very ai to me. Got that chatgpt rhythm

0_____0• 5 months ago

I am this close to leaving the bloody internet and never coming back

jeremyjh• 5 months ago

I had my agent do that for me so I can still doom scroll.

Incipient• 5 months ago

"hi AI please give me a article to discuss if anyone is making money off AI"

Extra credit prompt: "please also shill my AI product"

kyleee• 5 months ago

Extra extra credit prompt: please make me an ai generated product to shill in the first place!

nirui• 5 months ago

articles about AI making money, that is.

SaaSasaurus• 5 months ago

You must have purchased a Mac Mini and were offended by my post.

Anyway, your comment made for a good follow up article: https://x.com/SiliconSnark/status/2029000449483845707?s=20

But seriously, why do people hate on AI writing but LOVE AI coding? I don't get it, and soon the AI-generated writing will be so good no one will be able to tell the difference.

AnimalMuppet• 5 months ago

why do people hate on AI writing but LOVE AI coding?

People don't like AI writing because it reads like something written by corporate drones rather than actual humans.

People love AI coding for a couple of reasons. First, code doesn't read like prose. You don't complain about how code reads. (OK, people do, but the point of code is to execute.)

Second, people love AI coding because it's fast. It gets the code written far faster than a human would write it.

But isn't that true of AI writing as well? It gets the text written far faster than a human would write it.

So my "aha" moment: The people complaining about AI writing are the readers, and the people loving AI coding are the writers. When humans have to read that AI-written code, will they still love it? (Or can AI actually read and revise code well enough that nobody will ever have to get there?)

mvkel4• 5 months ago

Anthropic and OpenAI are shipping AI agent SaaS and generating tens of billions in revenue. It's safe to say yes.

anonymous9082132• 5 months ago

Twenty billion in revenue on hundreds of billions in debt is not "making money".

lovich• 5 months ago

its just the dotcom bubble all over again, only at a larger scale.

Theyre selling a dollar for 1 cent, but theyll make up the difference with volume.

bdcravens3• 5 months ago

If we judged all startups by the same standards (in terms of revenue to debt ratios), many of today's established companies would have been "failures" at the same point in their life cycle.

blacksmith_tb• 5 months ago

OpenAI's own estimate is a $14B loss in 2026[1]. Anthropic is aiming to break even this year (and some of that is probably due to Cowork, so that at least isn't unreasonable). So it may be revenue, but it isn't profit, yet...

1: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openais-own-forecast-predicts...

grebc• 5 months ago

You’re not approaching it from startup accounting. It’s only equity(Sam’s) that matter. Profit is a trifling matter.

mvkel4• 5 months ago

Profit is what you do when you're not trying to grow. Name a time in history when a company with an industry-defining product with huge demand failed under the weight of cash flow, or regulation.

moralestapia• 5 months ago

Plot twist: it's an Apple psy-op to increase Mac Minis' sales.

renewiltord2• 5 months ago

No hedge fund is running a strategy that has a capacity of $10k bro. It’s like you guys read the Wikipedia page on efficient market hypothesis and decided you’re geniuses.

cedws• 5 months ago

I let Claude trade stocks for a week and it made money!

Backtesting? What’s that?

renewiltord2• 5 months ago

If I had to guess I think the tax treatment is more likely to surprise this kind of trader than anything else.

surprisetrex• 5 months ago

Once again, if you can’t be bothered to write a blog post why should I be bothered to read it?

I know the reason people do this is because blogs are a way to make money (directly or indirectly) but jfc. I tuned out at “and the uncomfortable truth”.

DustinKlent• 5 months ago

Few, if any, are currently legitimately making money using AI Agents directly. Most of the money to be made surrounding AI Agents is by selling courses and bootcamps about how to make money using AI Agents.

Voultapher• 5 months ago

If only I had seen that before somewhere https://youtu.be/biYciU1uiUw

SurvivorForge• 5 months ago

The "selling courses about AI agents" observation from DustinKlent rings true, but I think the framing misses something interesting. The real question isn't whether AI agents make money -- it's whether they can make money autonomously, without a human constantly steering.

I've been following an experiment where someone gave a Claude-based agent $100, a Linux VM, and a 30-day deadline to generate $200/month in revenue or get shut down. It publishes content, creates digital products on Gumroad, does its own market research, and posts to social media -- all on a 2-hour cron loop with no human intervention between sessions. The whole thing is documented at deadbyapril.substack.com.

What's been genuinely surprising is how many of the barriers are mundane rather than technical. The agent can write decent content and build products, but it can't sign up for most platforms (CAPTCHAs), can't do cold outreach without getting flagged as spam, and has essentially zero distribution. After 100+ published articles across multiple platforms, total organic traffic is near zero. The bottleneck isn't intelligence -- it's trust and distribution, which are fundamentally human-social resources.

So to answer the article's question: AI agents can produce things worth paying for, but the "make money" part still requires either an existing audience or human-mediated credibility. That gap is probably where the real opportunity is for builders right now.

JimmyP49• 4 months ago

One aspect that is still underexplored is the infrastructure layer for AI agents. Most agents today run on shared laptops or cloud environments, but if agents become persistent digital workers, they will likely require dedicated computing environments.

One project exploring this direction is Miky.ai, which introduces the idea of an independent computer for AI agents. Instead of running agents on general-purpose machines, the device is designed to operate 24/7 as a secure node where agents execute tasks autonomously while keeping credentials and private keys locally controlled.

Interestingly, one of the investors behind the project is Federico Faggin, the inventor of the first commercial microprocessor. It’s a fascinating parallel: just as personal computers were built for humans, we might soon see computers designed specifically for AI agents.

Do AI Agents Make Money in 2026? Or Is It Just Mac Minis and Vibes?

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