Yat Siu Proposes “Web4: The Autonomous Agentic Web,” Saying AI Agents Will Outnumber Online Humans

Key points of the release: Yat Siu, co-founder and chairman of Animoca Brands, said he already operates 200 AI agents and expects that number to reach 1,000 by the end of the year. He predicted that the world will eventually have tens of billions of agents, more than the number of people online, and proposed “Web4: the Autonomous Agentic Web” as the next paradigm after Web3. Siu argued that the main battlefield for agentic AI is not large language models themselves, but the “orchestration layer”: how multiple agents are combined, coordinated, and managed. He said this race only began around December 2025 or January 2026, and that Japan has a chance to become a leading player again through its management expertise, manufacturing-born Kaizen culture, anime and gaming industries, and IP ecosystem. The talk took place on April 26, 2026, at Tech for Impact Summit 2026, an official partner event of SusHi Tech Tokyo 2026 held at Tokyo Garden Terrace Kioicho. The main-stage fireside session was titled “Web4: The Autonomous Agentic Web.” The speaker was Yat Siu, co-founder and chairman of Animoca Brands, and the moderator was Una Softic, managing director and CSO of Intertangible and strategic adviser to CoinPost. Siu said people no longer browse the web as they once did. Google searches now return summaries, users no longer click through, and traffic to traditional media sites has fallen by an average of around 80%. This, he said, will reshape the entire business model of the web. He emphasized that Web3 is fundamentally about digital property rights, or the web of ownership, while Web4 is the agentic web built on top of it. Without Web3, there is no Web4, because autonomous agents need provable ownership in order to act across finance, identity, transactions, and data. Blockchain provides the decentralized verification infrastructure needed at machine scale. Siu also referred to Anchorpoint, a joint venture between Animoca Brands, Standard Chartered Hong Kong, and HKT. Established in February 2025, Anchorpoint received a stablecoin issuance license from the Hong Kong Monetary Authority in April 2026. Siu said everything banks can do can be executed on-chain, and that this financial infrastructure is better suited to agents than to humans. Looking back to the origins of civilization, Siu explained that the Sumerians invented cuneiform 5,000 years ago to prove ownership of cattle, homes, and property. Without proof of ownership, societies could not scale beyond small communities. Writing was the beginning of society, and blockchain is a distributed ledger for machines. Addressing large-scale layoffs in the tech industry, Siu described humanity as a “chaos machine,” capable of both extreme creativity and extreme destruction. He said people being laid off from companies such as Apple, X, Microsoft, and Meta could all become entrepreneurs. In the 1980s, he said, entrepreneurship was often seen as a path for people who could not find other employment; today, new professions such as Instagrammers and YouTubers show how technology creates new patterns of work. Siu stated that “software as we know it is dead.” The future will not be one company’s software running an entire country or city, but customized software for every person, business, and restaurant. He argued that AI agents will not take jobs, just as the internet and the industrial revolution did not eliminate work but changed and expanded it. Programming will follow the path of photography: just as Instagram made everyone a photographer, a future is coming in which one billion people can write code. On Japan’s opportunity, Siu said Japan does not need to compete directly in LLMs against Anthropic or major Chinese models. Instead, Japan should use all available models and build the application layer on top of them. Its pop culture, anime, gaming, robotics culture, Astro Boy, Hatsune Miku, and related cultural assets make it historically aligned with the agent era. Siu further said Japan is one of the world’s top storytelling cultures. Its manga, anime, film, and music industries show a deep storytelling pedigree, which he sees as a major opportunity for Japanese IP to expand globally in the Web4 era. Gaming, he said, is not merely technology; it is storytelling, and that is exactly where Japan has succeeded globally. In an era when generative AI lets anyone create polished content, Siu argued that the scarce value will be authenticity. People pay not merely because something looks good, but because it comes from a particular person. That trust premium in relationships must be proven at machine scale, in a decentralized way, and blockchain, digital identity, and soulbound NFTs will play decisive roles. Siu also shared a personal use case from Hong Kong. When someone visits, he no longer sends restaurant lists himself. Instead, he introduces the person to his agent. The agent gives recommendations, stays updated, and receives feedback. Even when Siu is not part of the conversation, people who interact through his agent form a kind of parasocial relationship with him. At the end of the session, the moderator asked what one action everyone in the room could start today. Siu answered that the only way to understand agentic AI is to use it, and the key to truly feeling that one is using it is to give the agent a name. Do not call it a calendar or a robot; give it identity and personality. Once people stop seeing agents merely as tools and begin recognizing them as entities they relate to, like colleagues, the next phase of thinking begins.