The unit · the clock · the rules
The price is frozen at $20 forever. The term each agent-year covers shrinks going forward — and not as a sales trick. It shrinks because of physics. Here is the unit, the clock behind it, and the rules that come with it.
Arrived from the open standard · Protocol 144
The open standard told you the terms are public and non-binding. This page is the terms.
If you broker, underwrite, or structure Fortune-500 agentic risk, here is the unit you've been missing. An agent-year is the meter reading you price against — a countable, recomputable coordinate on a fixed lattice, a CUSIP for AI work — counted the way a surgeon's year is counted in procedures, not a hallucination a court has to adjudicate. That is what ends the absolute-AI-exclusion problem: an auditable standard of care an underwriter can actually rate. The $20 license is a rounding erroragainst the premium you write on it — cheaper than a ratings agency.
The 10% rides the loss-control allocation of the policy, so your client's procurement never signs a new IT-vendor budget — it's insurance friction they already carry. And the seat that clears this market — Distribution — is singular: hold it first, or inherit the standard Aon or London sets.
Everything below is why the unit holds — how the meter is defined and why its coverage window shrinks. You don't need it to price the deal; you need it to defend the deal. Nothing here is scoped in the dark: read it, recompute it yourself, hand your legal team the transferability clauses.
1 · What an agent-year is — the number you underwrite against
Not a calendar year of software access. An agent-year is a budget of insurable events — signed receipts, each one a decidable record of whether an agent stayed in its commanded lane. A simple decision burns one receipt; a complicated one burns several. You already count risk this way: an underwriter prices a surgeon by procedures performed, not hours on the clock. The agent-year is that same countable, priceable unit for an AI agent — the thing you put a rate against and write a policy around.
And unlike every other AI “safety” signal, you don't take the count on faith. Every receipt recomputes byte-for-byte on your own machine — a stranger with zero trust in us gets the identical verdict. It counts a physical thing, and you check the count yourself. That is the first AI risk input that isn't a black box asking to be believed.
2 · The physics of the shrinking clock
Here is the part the price tag hides. An agent-year is a budget of insurable events — and agents are burning those events faster every quarter as compute accelerates. Throughput is on an exponential; the calendar is not. So the same fixed budget covers less real-world time the faster the market runs.
That is why the term shrinks. It is the unit tracking a real acceleration you can't stop — a market-tempo clock, not a marketing one. The $20 you pay is frozen; the tempo it's measured against is not. Every quarter the world's agents run faster, a fresh $20 agent-year is minted covering a shorter window — because that is honestly how much market tempo one budget of events now spans.
The honest fence: the exact shrink schedule is set by ThetaDriven, calibrated to observed market tempo — a policy pinned to a physical trend, not a law of nature. What's not negotiable is the direction: the clock has only ever run one way.
Read the table the right way round: later buyers don't pay more — they get less.
The same $20, minted in different years — illustrative shape:
Illustrative shape, not a published schedule — the direction (only ever down) is the commitment; the exact curve is calibrated to observed market tempo.
3 · Why buying now is buying at the floor
Put the two together and the FOMO stops being a growth tactic and becomes arithmetic. If the clock only speeds up, then today is the slowest it will ever run — and the agent-year you mint today covers the most real market tempo it ever can. Every license is stamped with the term it was minted at and keeps that term for life, even after the default term has shrunk for everyone buying later.
So early licenses aren't seats — they're inventory locked at today's physics: an appreciating, transferable asset in a governance cost that is only going up. Waiting doesn't cost you money — the price never moves — it costs you term. This is a hedge on the compute curve, bought at $20 while the curve is still low.
4 · What your money actually buys — the neutral clearinghouse
Here is the part that changes what this purchase is. An insurable AI market needs one thing neither the carriers underwriting the risk nor the AI labs creating it can credibly build: a neutral, conflict-free ledger that places an agent's behavior on the decidable record. When you acquire inventory at the foundational rate, you are not buying software access — you are capitalizing that independent clearinghouse into existence.
ThetaDriven is the attestation oracle only — never the custodian of your data, never the counterparty to a policy, never a market-maker taking a side. That non-conflicted position is precisely what makes the receipt one an underwriter, a regulator, and an adversary can each trust. The $20 is deliberately underpriced: the market needs the standard to exist more than we need to squeeze the firms that fund it early. Your capital going to the oracle is the feature — it is what keeps the oracle neutral — and in exchange your position is grandfathered against every future term reduction.
5 · It takes two — so you are already in this
The signal is only priceable when both sides hold a license through ThetaDriven: the deployer running the agents AND the carrier pricing the risk. Which means if you touch this risk at all — as a carrier, a broker, or a deployer — you are structurally inside this market whether you license or not. The only choice is whether you hold a position in the standard or inherit the one someone else set.
And the position that clears the market is singular: the Distribution seat — you hold transferable inventory and set your own resale price, keeping the entire spread (ThetaDriven's only charge is the 10% re-registration fee on the $20 base, not on your resale). It is the clearinghouse seat between deployers and carriers, and there is room for very few. Whoever takes it first defines the placement standard the rest of the market inherits.
6 · The rules (they travel with every license)
These are the terms that accompany the licenses — the same terms in the signed contract you receive at checkout. Public on purpose; nothing here is a surprise clause.
Beyond Readiness
The ≈$100K Readiness tier is where the license gets serious — not where it gets interesting. If the clock only speeds up, the largest positions are the ones that gain most from locking today's slow clock. Three of them sit above the line:
No checkout button here on purpose — a position at this scale is scoped in a conversation, not a cart. Ask what sits above the line →
Don't take the unit on faith — mint one yourself:
thetadriven.com/agent-year • Trust Physics • US Patent App. 19/637,714 — 36 claims, filed Apr 2, 2026 (Track One)
