Apr 10, 2026 · 47m · more-or-less
Vercel CEO: 70% of Our Traffic Is Now AI Agents "Nobody Was Prepared" | Anthropic, OpenClaw, OpenAI
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch discusses the rapid transition to an 'agentic internet' where 70% of traffic is driven by AI agents, necessitating a total overhaul of cloud infrastructure, security protocols, and SaaS business models.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The hosts hold 40.6% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 5.0 Guest teaching 4.1 Guest disagreement 0.5 The hosts pushing back 0.4
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 20:01 Rebuttal on vibe-coded app durability
Guillermo directly rejects Brit's skeptical premise that viral vibe-coded creations are merely disposable blips that quickly die out, citing persistent traffic to tools like World Monitor and the Epstein files browser.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 35:13 Brit presses Guillermo with Sam's uninvestable software thesisBrit confronts Guillermo with the contrarian stance that software has become fundamentally uninvestable, directly prompting him to defend where venture value can still be captured.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 7:45 Guillermo reveals 70% agentic traffic milestoneGuillermo educates the hosts on the unprecedented velocity of the agentic shift by revealing that 70% of Vercel docs traffic is generated by autonomous coding agents, completely flipping the previous year's 90% human baseline.
The host holds their own ▶ 25:40 Dave articulates architecture and design of dreams.mdDave commands the conversation by detailing his technical design of dreams.md for OpenClaw, demonstrating firsthand expertise in building persistent, model-agnostic memory systems for AI agents.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The hosts as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The hosts pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| More or Less Podcast Graphic Interlude | 3 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Brit and Dave open the show with casual banter about their Japan trip and review the week's headline AI news. The interaction is friendly and purely sets up the topics. | |
| The Anthropic and OpenClaw Infrastructure Story | 5 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Dave highlights direct conversations with Anthropic regarding unprecedented agentic load. Guillermo explains how coding agents fundamentally surprised frontier AI labs by becoming the core catalyst for general-purpose agent emergence. | |
| Compute Thirst and Background Agent Reproduction | 3 | 6 | 0 | 0 | Guillermo stuns the hosts by revealing that 70% of Vercel documentation traffic comes from autonomous coding agents rather than humans. Brit asks clarifying questions on the shift timeline and growth metrics. | |
| Disrupting the SaaS Business Model with Tokens | 7 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Dave advances a strong thesis that the SaaS ARR business model is dead and AI monetization is fundamentally metered compute. Guillermo confirms and elaborates on the metering challenges and user game theory under fixed subscriptions. | |
| Managed Agents vs. Open Ecosystem Optionality | 5 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Brit questions Claude's launch of managed agents alongside API restrictions, and Dave highlights venture-backed subsidies. Guillermo breaks down how vertical lock-in and training on user data subsidize platforms, contrasting this with Vercel's zero-retention gateway. | |
| Building the AWS of Agentic Infrastructure | 6 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Dave demonstrates technical insight into Vercel's architecture, asking Guillermo how they plan to evolve from serverless edge functions to isolated container boxes. Guillermo outlines Vercel's vision of becoming the AWS of agentic infrastructure. | |
| Fluid Compute and Vibe-Coded Ephemeral Apps | 3 | 5 | 2 | 1 | Brit questions whether vibe-coded ephemeral apps quickly fade into irrelevance. Guillermo counters with specific examples like World Monitor and an Epstein files browser, explaining that fluid compute gracefully handles both spikes and lasting utility. | |
| The Soul of an Agent: soul.md and dreams.md | 8 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Dave takes center stage, explaining his architecture and release of the dreams.md feature for OpenClaw to handle lightweight, persistent agent self-improvement. Guillermo validates the paradigm and compares OpenClaw's grassroots evolution to Linux. | |
| Internal Agentic Loops at Vercel | 3 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Guillermo explains how Vercel adapts episodic memory and feedback loops for enterprise multi-user agents, illustrating how finance agents push back on employee metrics. Dave interjects briefly to clarify voice versus text interfaces. | |
| Hiring 'Steward' Roboticists in the AI Era | 4 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Brit brings up emerging apprenticeship models and AI interview deception. Guillermo expands on this with Vercel's hiring framework, where employees are screened as roboticist stewards through zero-AI tests and agent-maxing challenges. | |
| AI Investment Strategies and Risk Mitigation | 6 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Brit challenges Guillermo with Sam Altman's thesis that software is uninvestable. Guillermo reframes the thesis by showing how non-technical domain experts, like a trained neurosurgeon, leverage AI to tackle complex regulatory and integration bottlenecks, which Dave reinforces with examples from creator workshops. | |
| The 'New Technical' and Orchestration | 7 | 6 | 0 | 0 | Dave provides historical depth by comparing modern AI orchestration to Apple engineers moving from assembly language to C. Guillermo closes with startling disclosures of AWS availability zones being physically droned in Dubai and Bahrain, forcing major global infrastructure rerouting. |
Statements from this episode (29)
Morin: Vercel is valued at around $9 billion to $10 billion
“Now we're talking nine, 10, something like that.”
Morin: Anthropic cut off OpenClaw access for Claude Pro and Max users
“And days later, Anthropic announced that they are shutting off access for Claude Pro and Max users who are Open Call users to use their product.”
Dave Morin: Nobody was prepared to handle agentic workloads
“Agentic workloads are something that I think nobody was prepared to handle from an infrastructure perspective.”
Rauch: Coding agents are the necessary foundation for general-purpose AI agents
“Turned out that a coding agent was a necessary DNA for full personal agents and general purpose agents to grow first.”
Rauch: Major AI labs view coding agents as most promising AGI path
“You know, I've spoken with a bunch of people about this at every other lab and they themselves have been surprised that a coding agent was, is the most promising path to AGI.”
Rauch: Nearly 70% of Vercel documentation traffic comes from coding agents
“Nearly 70% of traffic To Vercel docs is now coming from coding agents. 70% and only 30% of page views are coming from humans.”
Rauch: Vercel Signups Are Growing 50% Month Over Month
“Our signups are growing by 50% month over month.”
Rauch: AI agents will soon independently sign up and pay for services
“I fully expect agents to be signing up for services directly, zero human intervention soon, making payments on behalf of people imminently, you know, getting credit cards and budgets and solving entire problems for people where the service provider becomes an,…”
Rauch: The SaaS business model will be disrupted by AI agents
“The SAS business model definitely gets disrupted because it was predicated on selling seats.”
Dave Morin: ARR is no longer a viable metric in pay-per-token AI
“ARR is no longer a viable metric when the actual business model is pay per token.”
Rauch: AI model providers cannot sustain flat subscription pricing
“By the way, one prediction that I, that I'll make is that it's going to continue to get more and more complicated for them to sustain the subscription thing, because it's almost an impossible problem.”
Rauch: Anthropic long refused to support agents.md, requiring claude.md files
“For example, I don't know if they've adapted yet, but Anthropic for a long time was not playing ball with agents.md. You could only call their instructions claude.md.”
Rauch: Vercel aims to become the AWS of agentic infrastructure
“So that's the focus of the company right now build being the AWS of agentic infrastructure.”
Rauch: Generating software will win over searching for and procuring software
“Generating software, it was in competition now with Googling for software, but now generating software is not just in competition, it's going to win. It means that everyone can produce their own software for personal use or for enterprise use, because why woul…”
Rauch: Giving AI agents full computer access produces an AGI-like experience
“The very fascinating thing about agents is the more power an agent has, the more intelligently it performs. And so if an agent has an entire computer, like a Mac mini, it, you feel like you have AGI in your hands.”
Rauch: OpenClaw has similar potential to Linux to become ubiquitous infrastructure
“But this is a good problem to have because when, ah, I really think that, you know, OpenClaw is like Linux. And I agree with Jensen Huang that when Linus Torvalds introduced Linux on the mailing list, he said, I have this toy kernel. Totally not for production…”
Dave Morin: Agent personality and memories must be portable across models
“Because like one of the other things that we're seeing a lot of is that, you know, if Anthropic decides that they need to shift their business model or whatever, whatever intelligence you're using underneath your agent, you still want its soul and its memories…”
Rauch: Vercel routes customer data queries through an internal AI agent
“In the past, Questions about customers would happen through, maybe there is a Salesforce account open, and the data team, the data integration, and if it's a very complex question, I have to ask a data analyst. All of that is going through an agent now.”
Rauch: Data analyst agents must push back and correct company terminology
“One of the things about a data analyst agent is that it should correct you in your terminology. If a Brit comes into Vercel and says, tell me how many weekly active users we have. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. At Vercel, we have weekly active developers …”
Rauch: Vercel candidates must explain how they would automate their own roles
“And so basically everyone at Vercel is now kind of like the steward of the agent, and that's their new job expectation. And now it's become part of our job screening, which actually forces the hiring manager to think about, I'm hiring a roboticist. I'm not hir…”
Rauch: Vercel Uses a 'Zero AI' Interview to Test Raw Candidate Abilities
“And for that, we actually do a zero AI interview and I basically need a platform for the zero AI interview with clearly detection.”
Guillermo Rauch: Focusing angel investments on AI agent risk mitigation
“I've been particularly interested in everything around risk mitigation for agents, obviously, for obvious reasons.”
Rauch: Being technical now means using AI tools effectively
“The new technical is that you used AI tools so well that what people used to take pride in being technical on is now an implementation detail that is less important.”
Morin: Adopting AI coding tools is like moving up the compiler stack
“We're kind of like just moving up the compiler stack again.”
Rauch: Vercel hired a 17-year-old whose offer was signed by his mother
“Today, we gave an offer or we finalized an the offer got signed by a mother. Why? Because we hire someone that's 17 years old, that we went through the trouble of, like, doing it lawfully, obviously, and having his parents approve, because this person is so ov…”
Rauch: Bewildering agent demand will spark battles over CPU and GPU allocation
“One thing I also predict is that the stress on infrastructure is going to be bewildering. Who gets allocation of hardware is going to become a big battle. Again, it's not just GPUs, by the way, it's also CPUs. Who gets access to raw metal to satisfy the endles…”
Rauch: Vercel rerouted Dubai region after two AWS availability zones were droned
“Our region in Dubai got taken offline because of war. You know, two of our availability zones hosted by AWS were droned. So we had to reroute an entire region”
Rauch: Cloud infrastructure will increasingly become a physical target in conflicts
“I think we're going to continue to see how our cloud infrastructure becomes a target because the most valuable thing will be the computers being online and doing number crunching and processing and disseminating intelligence.”