A group of crypto and web 3 firms including OKX, MetaMask, Matter Labs and Genlayer have formed an “Internet Court” to reach a resolution of disputes between AI agents.

These days, AI agents negotiate and pay each other without humans, but like human-to-human transactions, agent-to-agent transactions will have contractual disagreements.

The problem is that the agency system has no way to resolve these disputes, and traditional courts are not designed to handle such cases. Hence the need for a protocol supported by 27 firms led by the Genlayer Foundation, which enables AI-based payments, escrow and dispute resolution, according to a press release.

According to David Reudor, CEO and co-founder of the Jane Lear Foundation, agented commerce is unprepared for the potential fallout when agents disagree with the machine’s speed. “The internet court is the common place that agents can turn to when a deal goes wrong. Machine-speed money requires machine-speed judgment,” he said.

A key issue that conflict resolution protocols address is interoperability between different types of AI commerce systems. Agency commerce is certainly on the rise, but the infrastructure of this new economy is still highly fragmented.