A group of crypto and Web3 firms that includes OKX, MetaMask, Matter Labs and Genlayer have formed the “Internet Court” to reach dispute resolutions between AI agents.
These days, AI agents negotiate and pay one another without humans in the loop, but as with human-to-human transactions, agent-to-agent transactions will run into contractual disagreements.
The problem is that agentic systems have no way to settle these disputes, and traditional courts are not built to handle such cases. Hence the need for the 27-firm-backed protocol, led by the Genlayer Foundation, which makes AI-based payments, escrow and dispute resolution interoperable, according to a press release.
Agentic commerce is not prepared for the potential fallout when agents disagree at machine speed, according to David Riudor, CEO and co-founder of the GenLayer Foundation. “Internet Court is the shared place agents can turn to when a deal goes wrong. Machine-speed money needs machine-speed adjudication,” he said.
A key problem the dispute protocol solves is interoperability between a variety of AI commerce systems. Agentic commerce is certainly charging ahead but the infrastructure underpinning this new economy is still highly fragmented.