A group of crypto and Web3 companies including OKX, MetaMask, Matter Labs and Genlayer have formed the “Internet Court” to help resolve disputes between AI agents.
Today, AI agents negotiate and pay each other without humans being involved, but as with human-to-human transactions, agent-to-agent transactions will be fraught with contractual disagreements.
The problem is that agent systems have no way to resolve these disputes and traditional courts are not designed to handle such cases. Hence the need for a protocol backed by 27 companies, led by the Genlayer Foundation, that makes AI-based payments, escrow and dispute resolution interoperable, according to a press release.
Agent commerce is unprepared for the potential consequences when agents disagree at machine speed, according to David Riudor, CEO and co-founder of the GenLayer Foundation. “The Internet court is the shared space that agents can turn to when a deal goes bad. Money at machine speed needs decision at machine speed,” he said.
One of the key issues addressed by the Dispute Resolution Protocol is interoperability between various commercial AI systems. Agentic commerce is certainly growing, but the infrastructure that underpins this new economy remains very fragmented.
