In the not-too-distant future everyone will be using so-called AI agents.

Connected to the cloud, they will live inside your mobile phone ready to assist in whatever tasks you need accomplished, from replying to emails and booking flights to tax-loss harvesting in your portfolio.

Robinhood’s customers now use AI agents to analyze stock market gyrations and make autonomous trades based on custom instructions. SAP’s Joule helps its enterprise customers analyze inventory, source the best suppliers and procure goods. Shopping agents operating at machine speed like Amazon’s Buy for Me will scan the web for the best deals, negotiate terms with agents representing the seller, establish delivery windows and make purchases.

Well-known AI and crypto companies, from Anthropic and OpenAI to Coinbase and Circle, are already racing to make this bot-driven future a reality for all.

But what happens when the couch your agent ordered arrives in the wrong color? Or gets delivered two weeks late, or damaged in a way the seller insists happened after delivery?

This is a potentially expensive and perhaps unavoidable problem hiding inside the grand vision of agentic commerce. Software may already be able to shop, bargain, hire and pay on behalf of humans and businesses, but AI hallucinates and commerce has never been only about the exchange of money. Mishaps are inevitable.

“Agentic commerce is reaching a critical turning point, and we’re not prepared for the potential fallout,” says David Riudor, CEO and co-founder of the GenLayer Foundation, a Cayman Islands-based entity that helps run a new blockchain called GenLayer and its main application, Internet Court, which is designed to adjudicate agentic disputes. The court operates free of human interference and is backed by 26 other crypto and AI companies, including heavyweights like crypto exchange OKX, wallet provider MetaMask and Binance’s BNB Chain.

As ambitious and futuristic as it sounds, Internet Court is not an attempt to fully replace judges with a stack of bots. It is better understood as a system that helps agents create contracts with clear terms, and if they can't agree on the outcome, an AI jury evaluates the evidence and delivers a verdict in minutes.

Riudor says the technology is most useful for smaller transactions where hiring a lawyer would be irrational, but doing nothing would still be........

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