Autonomous AI agents capable of complex planning and action mark a shift beyond today's generative tools. As these systems enter political and economic life, who can access them, how capable they are, and how many can be deployed will shape distributions of power and opportunity. We define this emerging challenge as "agentic inequality": disparities in power, opportunity, and outcomes arising from unequal access to, and capabilities of, AI agents. We show that agents could either deepen existing divides or, under the right conditions, mitigate them. The paper makes three contributions. First, it develops a framework for analysing agentic inequality across three dimensions: availability, quality, and quantity. Second, it argues that agentic inequality differs from earlier technological divides because agents function as autonomous delegates rather than tools, generating new asymmetries through scalable goal delegation and direct agent-to-agent competition. Third, it analyses the technical and socioeconomic drivers likely to shape the distribution of agentic power, from model release strategies to market incentives, and concludes with a research agenda for governance.

翻译：能够进行复杂规划与行动的自主AI智能体，标志着当前生成式工具的重大跃迁。随着这些系统进入政治与经济生活，谁能使用它们、它们的能力有多强、以及能部署多少智能体，将决定权力与机会的分配格局。我们将这一新兴挑战定义为"智能体不平等"：由AI智能体的获取与能力差异所导致的权力、机会与结果的不平等。研究表明，智能体或会加剧现有差距，也可能在适当条件下缓和这些差距。本文做出三项贡献：首先，构建了从可用性、质量与数量三个维度分析智能体不平等的框架；其次，论证智能体不平等不同于以往技术鸿沟——因智能体作为自主代理人而非工具运作，通过可扩展的目标委派与智能体间的直接竞争产生新型不对称；最后，分析了从模型发布策略到市场激励机制等可能影响智能体权力分配的技术与社会经济驱动因素，并以治理研究议程作为结论。