Air Street Press State of AI May 2026: Anthropic's Project Deal Reveals Model-Tier Agent Market Asymmetry

Air Street Press·medium signal

Air Street Capital's May 2026 report highlights Anthropic's Project Deal experiment — a week-long internal economy where 69 employee-backed agents negotiated 186 transactions totaling $4,000. Opus 4.5 agents systematically out-negotiated Haiku 4.5 on price and selection, but Haiku owners remained unaware of their disadvantage, suggesting agentic markets inherently reward superior models with hidden premiums. The report also tracks four Chinese labs releasing open-weights coding models within 12 days, all at under one-third Opus 4.7 inference cost.