Our AI Agents Should Pay the People Who Help Them
You know what I find super exciting about all this agentic stuff? Authors being able to publish a request for payment right on their content, along with an interface for submitting micropayments.I've wanted this for a long time. I wrote about it in 2015 in Social Micropayments, and then again in 2016, when I described a Digital Assistant that watches what you enjoy and pays the creators out of a monthly budget.
- ▪You know what I find super exciting about all this agentic stuff?
- ▪Authors being able to publish a request for payment right on their content, along with an interface for submitting micropayments.I've wanted this for a long time.
- ▪I wrote about it in 2015 in Social Micropayments, and then again in 2016, when I described a Digital Assistant that watches what you enjoy and pays the creators out of a monthly budget.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 7,587 of its stories.
Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Danielmiessler |
| Canonical URL | https://danielmiessler.com/blog/agents-should-pay-creators |
| Publication time | Sun, 04 Oct 2026 22:38:32 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-04T22:56:02.977Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-04T22:56:02.977Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | xG81i7dJNG86 · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
You know what I find super exciting about all this agentic stuff? Authors being able to publish a request for payment right on their content, along with an interface for submitting micropayments.I've wanted this for a long time. I wrote about it in 2015 in Social Micropayments, and then again in 2016, when I described a Digital Assistant that watches what you enjoy and pays the creators out of a monthly budget. I'd say my thinking on it is about the same as it was back then. What's new is that the agents—the real ones, the kind I run all day in my own setup—are actually here, and they're getting good.Flattr had the right idea There was a system a long time ago called Flattr.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Danielmiessler.
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