When do agents need coordination more than raw capability?

As long as an agent is a thin natural-language layer over a few APIs, what limits it is how well the model reasons. But the Foundation Protocol argues that agents are crossing a threshold: they now browse, purchase, deploy software, manage systems, and increasingly interact with one another, holding long-lived credentials and carrying financial, operational, and reputational consequences. Once that happens, the constraint that bites is no longer isolated capability. It is whether agents can form reliable relationships, organize multi-party work, exchange value, and remain safe and accountable under real oversight. A more capable model that cannot coordinate, settle accounts, or leave an audit trail is not deployable as a social or economic actor.

This is a shift in the locus of difficulty, and it changes what the field should optimize. Coordination, governance, and evidence are properties of the substrate between agents, not of any single model's weights. The counterpoint is that capability still gates everything — a model too weak to plan cannot participate at all — but past a threshold the marginal returns move to the connective tissue: identity, authority delegation, value attestation, provenance, and audit. This matters because it tells builders that the next frontier is infrastructural, and it explains why benchmark-leading models can still fail as participants in an agentic society.