The On-Device Agent Stack: How Edge-Native AI Is Splitting the Agent Market in Two
The agent market is fracturing along a hardware line. One side runs agents in the cloud, backed by Anthropic's SpaceX Colossus deal and Google's Gemini Spark. The other trains and deploys models natively on phones, Mac minis, and industrial edge devices. NXP shipped the first agentic AI framework for edge hardware at CES 2026. Oppo open-sourced an Android agent that keeps perception, memory, and action on the physical device. South Korea's Out of Set just raised seed funding to bypass cloud model compression entirely. The edge AI market is projected to hit $37.5 billion this year. This is the infrastructure split that will define which agents people actually trust.