Cathie Wood wants investors to follow the money AI agents spend

Cathie Wood has a new suggestion for investors trying to read the AI market: stop watching the chatbots and start watching the wallets. The ARK Invest CEO says smart investors should track where autonomous AI agents are spending money.

From quick chats to multi-hour shifts

According to ARK’s reports, agents went from handling tasks of around 12 minutes in early 2025 to more than 180 minutes by early 2026.

ARK credits ongoing innovation, including work from companies like Anthropic, for pushing these capabilities forward. The shift is from short, chat-based exchanges to complex jobs that run independently for hours.

ARK’s spending forecast is where the numbers get large. The firm projects AI-driven software spending could reach between $3 trillion and $7 trillion. ARK’s analysts frame that as potential growth of 19% to 56% in AI-driven software expenditures.

ARK expects both enterprises and consumers to drive that growth as they adopt persistent agent technology.

The end of the subscription era, maybe

Wood’s commentary on September 30, 2026, pointed to a possible change in how AI companies make money. She highlighted OpenAI’s move toward what she described as headless agents-as-a-service, aimed at higher per-user inference costs.

ARK suggests monetization could move toward a pay-for-work-completed model and away from traditional subscriptions.

The revenue picture at the leading labs is part of why ARK takes this seriously. OpenAI’s revenue projections point to a run-rate in the tens of billions, supported by expanding agent capabilities, with Anthropic showing similar growth.

Where ARK is putting its own money

During the week of September 21, 2026, ARK bought approximately $24.7 million worth of CoreWeave shares.

ARK has long built its brand on high-conviction bets in disruptive technology, and it continues to hold positions in digital assets like Bitcoin. Its AI agent thesis, though, centers on traditional tech and infrastructure markets rather than tokens or protocols.

What this means for investors and the AI market

If agents really are moving from minutes-long tasks to hours-long ones, the companies capturing value could shift. Infrastructure providers like CoreWeave stand to benefit from rising compute demand. Model developers like OpenAI and Anthropic could gain if per-task pricing lifts revenue per user.

Traditional software vendors face a trickier position. Seat-based subscriptions assume a human sits in each seat. If a headless agent does the work instead, the math behind those subscriptions starts to wobble.

The $3 trillion to $7 trillion range is a projection, not a guarantee, and the gap between its low and high ends is itself a sign of uncertainty.