This work examines chemical autonomous agents — minimal chemical reaction networks exhibiting dissipation, autocatalysis, homeostasis, and associative learning — under the lens of the free-energy principle — a normative account of adaptive systems. The free-energy principle allows us to 1) identify the partition of system states belonging to the agent, 2) uncover how that agent synchronises its internal states to its environment, 3) understand the agent’s environmental fitness from the reaction rate constants. This initial work suggests that the free energy principle can provide a systematic approach to decompose, analyse, and understand complex adaptive systems and artificial life.