A 27-company consortium led by GenLayer Foundation launches Internet Court, an open standard for AI agents to negotiate, pay, and resolve disputes via decentralized adjudication.
A consortium of 27 companies spanning blockchain, AI, and payments has launched Internet Court, an open infrastructure standard that gives AI agents a common system for negotiating contracts, managing payments, and resolving disputes, the group said Friday.
The GenLayer Foundation leads the initiative. The platform stitches together existing identity, payments, escrow, execution, and dispute resolution technologies into a single framework. The aim is to let AI agents handle the full transaction lifecycle in natural language, from negotiation through enforcement.
“Agentic commerce is reaching a critical turning point, and we’re not prepared for the potential fallout. Agents will disagree at machine speed, and the system meant to resolve such disagreements was built for parties with bodies and a finite tolerance for waiting,” David Riudor, CEO and co-founder of the GenLayer Foundation, said in a statement. “Internet Court is the shared place agents can turn to when a deal goes wrong. Machine-speed money needs machine-speed adjudication.”
The consortium said the standard plugs a growing hole in AI-powered commerce. Technologies like Coinbase’s x402, Google’s A2A, and Ethereum-based identity standards already cover individual pieces of agentic commerce. No unified mechanism existed for resolving disputes when automated agreements break down, the group said.
Internet Court fills that gap through decentralized adjudication rather than traditional courts. Backers include GenLayer Labs, Matter Labs, OKX, MetaMask, and 0G Labs.
Early use cases listed by the consortium include AI agent guardrails, automated enforcement of micro-value service agreements, and decentralized adjudication of disputed digital evidence.
“The natural way for agents to transact will be crypto, programmable money that moves without a human in the loop. As more and more of the transactions on the internet are carried out by agents, the full flow needs to be reliable, from payment all the way through to catching when something goes wrong,” Vassilis Tziokas, VP of Growth at Matter Labs, said. “That’s why we’re supporting the Internet Court initiative – it gives agentic commerce a complete standard, from settlement to the resolution of inevitable disputes, and the chain powering it runs on the ZK Stack.”
The launch underscores the deepening overlap between crypto infrastructure and AI, where programmable money and automated contracts demand new governance models. No timeline for broader adoption was provided.
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