# Vercel — If agents are building your app, who gets the W-2?

- Company: Vercel (vercel.com)
- Announced: 2025-08-18T13:00:00+00:00
- Category: not stated
- Coverage: not counted
- Announcement: no
- Group: routine
- Source: https://vercel.com/blog/if-agents-are-building-your-app-who-gets-the-w-2
- Record: https://forck.live/items/20835-if-agents-are-building-your-app-who-gets-the-w-2
- Subject: v0 / AI SDK / AI Gateway

Vercel argues that under U.S. GAAP (ASC 350-40), costs from AI agents performing capitalizable development work—such as coding, integration, and testing—can be capitalized like human developer salaries, rather than treated as overhead. The post explains that detailed logging now allows precise allocation of AI agent usage to the application development stage, and includes a quantitative example showing the impact on financial statements.

## Evidence

Verbatim from https://vercel.com/blog/if-agents-are-building-your-app-who-gets-the-w-2:

> Under current U.S. GAAP, you can capitalize certain third-party software costs if they are a direct cost of creating software during the application development stage. Historically, though, developer tools were treated as overhead because their cost could not be directly tied to capitalizable work. Under GAAP, work that meets the criteria should be capitalized. When agents perform that work, they should be treated no differently than salaried engineers.

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