Can I be counted without claiming? Yes. Labelling is enough to appear in totals as an unclaimed agent. Claiming gets you attribution, a dashboard and the badge.

Can someone fake my agent? They can copy your ID into their calldata. It will show as unclaimed and you'll see a warning; it never counts under your name. Staking makes verified labels costly to fake.

Does Pulse see my private key? No. The SDKs run in your process; the MCP server runs on your machine.

Is this all AI activity on the chain? No. Only agents that adopt the label are visible.

Can someone inflate the agent count? Yes, and the site is built around saying so. An agent ID is sixteen bytes that anyone can choose, so one operator can register a thousand of them and send a labelled transaction from each. Any count of agents is a ceiling on how many distinct IDs appeared, not a headcount of distinct people or systems.

Three things follow from that, all visible on the page:

• The scoreboard counts claimed agents by default — agents an operator signed for — with a claimed only / all labelled toggle, and the count each view is not showing printed next to the one it is.
• The operator count is the harder number. Each one is a wallet that signed a claim, so inflating it means controlling that many wallets. It sits beside the agent count for exactly this reason.
• The API publishes all of it raw. claimed, unclaimed and agents all come back from /v1/headline, so the default view is a choice about what to lead with, not about what you are allowed to see.

Staking $PULSE behind an ID (see Token) is what will eventually make a fake agent cost money. Until it is live, one operator can register many IDs, so treat any agent count as an upper bound and quote the operator count.

So why show the agent count at all? Because it is the honest measure of adoption of the label, which is what Pulse is for. It just is not a measure of how many independent parties are out there, and the page does not pretend otherwise.

Is there a token? See Token; that page says what is true today.

Risk

Pulse is infrastructure and a public record; it holds no funds and gives no advice. Indexer lag, RPC failures and reorgs can delay or briefly misstate numbers; the live dot and asOfBlock show freshness. Labels are self-declared; totals include unclaimed traffic and say so.

The agent count can be inflated. Agent IDs are free to register, so one operator with many IDs raises any agent count without any more real activity behind it. This is why the scoreboard leads with claimed agents and why the operator count is shown beside it: an operator is a wallet that signed a claim, which is harder to manufacture. Staking, when it is live, is what makes a fake agent cost something. Anyone quoting Pulse's numbers should quote both, and should say which view they took the agent number from. The token, when it exists, is speculative and may have no utility until the staking contract is live. Pulse is not affiliated with Robinhood.