Who Prices Cognitive Labor in the Age of Agents? A Position on Compute-Anchored Wages

arXiv:2605.05558v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A natural intuition about the economics of AI agents is that, because agents can be replicated at near-zero marginal cost, they constitute a labor input in infinitely elastic supply, and therefore drive cognitive-labor wages to zero. We argue this framing is wrong in mechanism but partially correct in conclusion, and that the correction matters for both theory and policy. \textbf{Agents are not labor; they are a production technology that converts compute capital $K_c$ into effective units of cognitive labor $L_A$.} Once this is recognized, the elastic-supply margin that anchors the equilibrium wage migrates from the labor market to the compute capital market. Building on the textbook factor-pricing framework \citep{mankiw2020}, we derive a \emph{Compute-Anchored Wage} (CAW) bound stating that, on tasks where human and agent cognitive labor are substitutes, the competitive human wage is bounded above by $\lambda \cdot k \cdot r_c$, where $r_c$ is the rental rate of compute capital, $k$ is the compute intensity of one effective agent-labor unit, and $\lambda$ is the relative human-to-agent productivity. We generalize the result through CES aggregation, separate substitutable from complementary tasks (yielding a directional inversion of skill-biased technical change), and discuss factor-share consequences. The position is concise: \emph{the price-setter for cognitive labor is no longer the labor market.}