AI Agent Business Models: Open-Source, SaaS, Acquired, Tokens

Four AI agent projects are showing distinct business models, and they are not directly competing with each other. For example, OpenClaw has accumulated over 370,000 GitHub stars. Hermes Agent, from Nous Research, processed 224 billion tokens in a single day, surpassing OpenClaw. Genspark, a super-agent platform, reached over $200 million in annualized revenue. And Manus, an autonomous agent, was acquired by Meta for over $2 billion, though this deal was later ordered unwound. These projects represent different approaches to what an agent business can be. The agent market is actually led by established coding-tool companies. OpenAI's Codex serves more than 2 million weekly users, and Anthropic's Claude Code reached about $1 billion in annualized revenue. Cursor, an AI code editor, raised $2.3 billion and is valued over $50 billion. GitHub Copilot has around 4.7 million paying users. These larger players highlight the true scale of the agent market.