AAA, Integra Launch Legal Protocol for AI Agent Commerce

The American Arbitration Association and blockchain documentation firm Integra Ledger released the Legal Context Protocol (LCP) on Wednesday. It is an open standard designed to attach verifiable legal terms to autonomous AI agent transactions.

Google, IBM, Circle, Wayfair, and more than a dozen blockchain and infrastructure companies signed on as founding contributors. The protocol addresses a gap the market has not solved: how to record which legal terms governed an agent trade, what jurisdiction applied, and how disputes get resolved when a deal goes wrong.

AAA president and CEO Bridget McCormack said, “If the legal terms that govern the transactions are not known or recorded in any single source of truth, your dispute about anything about the transaction starts at a really early phase.”

Participating organizations host a JSON file at a standardized URL path on their domain, the same way robots.txt governs crawler behavior. Before an agent commits to a transaction, it fetches that file, pulls the terms document, and checks a cryptographic hash to confirm the terms have not been altered. The hash gets recorded alongside the payment. If either party later contests the deal – in court, arbitration, or a regulatory review – both sides can independently verify which terms governed without relying on the other's records.

LCP defines four tiers of participation. None are mandatory, meaning each organization chooses what fits its risk profile. That optionality could create fragmentation, McCormack acknowledged. The protocol ships under an Apache 2.0 license, and its creators said governance will transfer to a neutral foundation so no single participant controls the standard.

IBM, a contributor with an AlphaScala Alpha Score of 42, likely sees LCP as a standard-setting play in agent commerce rather than a near-term revenue driver. The enterprise list also includes Stellar Development Foundation, Ava Labs, Cardano, Hedera, Mysten Labs (maker of Sui), Aptos Foundation, and Sei Labs. Identity and infrastructure providers Crossmint, Pinata, Baselayer, Trinsic, and the First Person Cooperative are part of the group, according to the AAA announcement.

Gartner projects that by 2028 AI agents will handle 90% of B2B purchases, routing more than $15 trillion through automated exchanges. The white paper published by AAA and Integra cited that number. Infrastructure for agent-driven commerce is already taking shape. Mastercard introduced Agent Pay for Machines, a platform for autonomous machine-to-machine payments backed by more than 30 partners. Google DeepMind published a control roadmap for securing internal AI agents. In June, Coinbase launched a product that lets AI assistants trade crypto and make payments through the x402 protocol.

Contract law already accommodates automated transactions. The Uniform Electronic Transactions Act and the UNCITRAL 2024 Model Law on Automated Contracting cover contracts formed through electronic agents. What none of those systems addressed before LCP was the evidentiary layer courts and regulators need to enforce agreements.

McCormack said some open questions remain – how to handle conflicting terms when two agents negotiate from different starting positions, for instance. Those questions have been left for coalition members to work out over time. “Like with all the other protocols governing payments and connectivity, there’ll be lots of contributors,” she said.