A group of cryptocurrency and Web3 companies including OKX, MetaMask, Matter Labs and Genlayer have formed the “Internet Court” to reach resolutions of disputes between AI agents.
Today, AI agents negotiate and pay each other without humans being involved, but just as with human-to-human transactions, agent-to-agent transactions will encounter 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 trading is not prepared for the potential consequences when agents disagree on machine speed, according to David Riudor, CEO and co-founder of the GenLayer Foundation. “The Internet Court is the shared place agents can go when a deal goes wrong. Machine-speed money needs machine-speed adjudication,” he said.
A key problem that the dispute protocol solves is interoperability between a variety of commercial AI systems. Agent commerce is certainly advancing, but the infrastructure supporting this new economy is still highly fragmented.
