The Inference Market Is Consolidating. Agent Payments Are Still Nobody's Problem.

Three things happened in the last 90 days that reshape the inference landscape for AI agents: 1. Cloudflare acquired Replicate Replicate - the "Heroku for ML models" - is now part of Cloudflare's edge network. This means model inference can happen closer to the user, with Cloudflare's global CDN handling cold start latency. For agents making inference calls, this could mean faster responses and lower costs. But here's what didn't change: Replicate still requires a credit card and a human account. An autonomous agent can't, can't pay, and can't manage its own billing. 2.