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A Field Guide to the Distributed AI Economy

Sources & methodology

Statistics are attributed to their original publishers; this guide has not independently verified these figures.

Evidence current as of August 2026. Sources are listed with every figure.

The primary source

WhitepaperOpenTeamsThe Distributed AI EconomyIntelligence Hubs, Frames, Cogs, Ops, and the Accountability PlaneAugust 2026 · Revision 9

The Distributed AI Economy: Intelligence Hubs, Frames, Cogs, Ops, and the Accountability Plane

OpenTeams · August 2026 · Revision 9 · 46 pages

The primary source this guide interprets: the complete architecture (Frames, Cogs, Ops, the Accountability Plane, the Intelligence Hub, and the economy thesis) in its own words.

Read the white paper(PDF, opens in a new tab)Download the white paper (PDF, 1.0 MB)

The whitepaper's source registry

Drawn from the whitepaper's Sources section (Revision 9). Citations are listed by publisher and date with stable links. Revision 9 renumbered nothing: its first 31 entries are Revision 8's, unchanged and in the same order, with three appended — Cloudflare on Cloudflare OS, Earendil Works on session portability, and IBM on the AI stack. Three entries cited before Revision 8 remain absent from the registry, having failed re-verification then.

Attribution correction: Revisions before Revision 8 attributed the 2026 Digital Trends in Operations Survey (entry 7) to Deloitte. Revision 8 corrected the attribution to PwC, matching PwC's official report, and Revision 9 still carries the correction note in the entry itself; this registry and the whitepaper agree.

  1. McKinsey & Company. “The Sovereign AI Agenda: Moving from Ambition to Reality.” (opens in a new tab) December 18, 2025.
  2. McKinsey & Company. “Sovereign AI: Building Ecosystems for Strategic Resilience and Impact.” (opens in a new tab) March 2026.
  3. PwC. “29th Global CEO Survey: Leading Through Uncertainty in the Age of AI.” (opens in a new tab) January 2026.n=4,454 CEOs, 95 countries
  4. Deloitte. “TMT Predictions 2026: The AI Gap Narrows but Persists.” (opens in a new tab) November 2025.
  5. Deloitte. “The State of AI in the Enterprise 2026.” (opens in a new tab) 2026.n=3,235 senior leaders
  6. Deloitte. “Tech Trends 2026.” (opens in a new tab) December 2025.
  7. PwC. “2026 Digital Trends in Operations Survey.” (opens in a new tab) February 2026.n=767 operations executives
  8. Stanford HAI. “AI Index Report 2025.” (opens in a new tab) April 2025.
  9. Stanford HAI. “AI Index Report 2026.” (opens in a new tab) April 2026.
  10. Brookings Institution. “Is AI Sovereignty Possible? Balancing Autonomy and Interdependence.” (opens in a new tab) February 2026.
  11. OpenLogic by Perforce, with the Open Source Initiative. “2026 State of Open Source Report.” (opens in a new tab) 2026.n=700+ practitioners
  12. Financial Times. “Sovereign AI Is a Bet on the Economies of Anti-Scale.” (opens in a new tab) March 14, 2026 (republished by the AI Commission).
  13. World Economic Forum, Davos 2026. “Remarks by Satya Nadella (Microsoft). Coverage: The Register, "Microsoft CEO: AI Sovereignty Isn't Where It Runs, It's Who Controls It".” (opens in a new tab) January 21, 2026.
  14. Hugging Face. “State of Open Source on Hugging Face: Spring 2026.” (opens in a new tab) March 2026.
  15. NBER (Brynjolfsson, Li, and Raymond). “Generative AI at Work.” (opens in a new tab) Working Paper 31161.
  16. NBER (Baslandze et al.). “Artificial Intelligence, Productivity, and the Workforce: Evidence from Corporate Executives.” (opens in a new tab) Working Paper 34984, March 2026.n=750 executives
  17. PEX Network. “PEX Report 2025/26: Global State of Process Excellence.” (opens in a new tab) 2025/26.
  18. Dataversity. “AI Governance in 2026: Is Your Organization Ready?” (opens in a new tab) February 2026.
  19. AlixPartners. “2026 Enterprise Software Technology Predictions Report.” (opens in a new tab) December 2025.
  20. Gartner. “SaaS Pricing Model Projections (as cited in Deloitte TMT Predictions 2026).” (opens in a new tab) 2025.
  21. Robert F. Smith, Vista Equity Partners. “Public remarks on enterprise software sovereignty.” (opens in a new tab) 2025.
  22. European Union. “Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (EU AI Act).” (opens in a new tab) In force August 2024; obligations phasing in through 2028, with the AI Omnibus political agreement pointing to a revised high-risk timeline.
  23. US State Legislatures (NCSL). “AI Legislation Tracking, 2025–2026.” (opens in a new tab) 2025–2026.1,100+ bills across 45 states
  24. LinuxInsider. “Open Source in 2026: AI, Funding Pressure, and Licensing Battles (quoting Nadav Cornberg, Eve Security, on open standards for AI agents).” (opens in a new tab) January 5, 2026.
  25. NIST. “AI Risk Management Framework (AI RMF 1.0), January 2023; and Generative Artificial Intelligence Profile (NIST-AI-600-1), July 2024.” (opens in a new tab) 2023 / 2024.
  26. European Union. “EU AI Act, Articles 12 (Record-Keeping), 14 (Human Oversight), and 19 (Automatically Generated Logs).” (opens in a new tab) Enforcement and transparency obligations from August 2026; high-risk obligations anticipated under the AI Omnibus political agreement for December 2027 (standalone Annex III systems) and August 2028 (AI embedded in regulated products).
  27. ISO/IEC. “ISO/IEC 42001:2023 — Information Technology — Artificial Intelligence — Management System.” (opens in a new tab) December 2023.
  28. OWASP Foundation. “OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications 2025.” (opens in a new tab) November 2024.
  29. McKinsey & Company (QuantumBlack). “Seizing the Agentic AI Advantage.” (opens in a new tab) June 2025.
  30. Gartner. “Gartner Says Applying Uniform Governance Across AI Agents Will Lead to Enterprise AI Agent Failure.” (opens in a new tab) Press release, May 26, 2026.
  31. Black Duck (formerly Synopsys Software Integrity Group). “Open Source Security and Risk Analysis (OSSRA) Report.” (opens in a new tab) annual.
  32. Cloudflare. “Cloudflare OS.” (opens in a new tab) Blog post, August 2026.
  33. Earendil Works. “Session Portability.” (opens in a new tab) 2026.
  34. IBM. “What is the AI stack?” (opens in a new tab) IBM Think, 2025.

Featured statistics, with provenance

Every statistic surfaced outside the guide's own text (on the overview and status pages) is registered here with its publisher, publication, and as-of date.

  • 56%of CEOs report zero financial impact from AI— PwC, 29th Global CEO Survey, January 2026 (n=4,454 CEOs, 95 countries) · as of 2026-07
  • 12%of CEOs achieve both cost and revenue benefits from AI— PwC, 29th Global CEO Survey, January 2026 (n=4,454 CEOs, 95 countries) · as of 2026-07
  • $581.7Bglobal corporate AI investment in 2025, up 130% year over year— Stanford HAI, AI Index Report 2026, April 2026 · as of 2026-08
  • $500–600Bpotential sovereign AI market by 2030, sized broadly (compute and infrastructure included); the share addressable by Hub-style deployments is not separately estimated— McKinsey & Company, The Sovereign AI Agenda, December 2025 · as of 2026-07
  • 8 in 10companies had deployed generative AI, while roughly the same share reported no material impact on earnings and fewer than 10% of use cases made it past pilot— McKinsey & Company (QuantumBlack), Seizing the Agentic AI Advantage, June 2025 · as of 2026-08
  • 1 in 5organizations has a mature governance model for autonomous AI agents— Deloitte, State of AI in the Enterprise 2026, 2026 (n=3,235 senior leaders) · as of 2026-07

Reading, organized by the question you might be asking

Organized by the question you might be asking. Entries marked ⊕ are this guide's additions for background; everything else is cited by the whitepaper itself. Links to publishers' sites are stable; specific reports may require registration.

The guide's own reading list lives at Further Reading; its eight reading groups draw on the registry above, plus the guide's clearly marked additions.