Executive Summary

This paper examines a fundamental shift in AI progress: from scaling the intelligence of individual agentic systems to scaling distributed superintelligence. It argues that today’s AI agents, despite their growing capabilities, remain constrained because of semantic isolation. Beyond vertically scaling agents, the next frontier requires new foundational infrastructure for horizontal scaling of intelligence. Such infrastructure would enable shared intent and shared context, accelerate collective innovation, and unlock genuinely emergent capabilities in multi-agent human–AI systems. Together, these systems can address a far broader class of intelligence problems with greater accuracy and robustness.

The paper outlines an Internet of Cognition, a new architectural approach to achieve this transformation and usher in an era of distributed artificial superintelligence. It introduces three necessary components of the architecture: a set of cognition state protocols at latent, compressed, and semantic state granularities (for aligning and coordinating intent), a trusted policy-governed fabric (for sharing knowledge and creating institution-wide context graphs¹), and cognition engines (for accelerating collective innovation). Together these elements demonstrate how open, interoperable standards are essential for creating multi-agent-human societies that can solve for novel complex problems and discoveries.