A group of 27 companies in the blockchain, AI and digital payments space has introduced Internet Court, an open infrastructure standard aimed at providing AI agents with a common framework for contract negotiation, payment management and dispute resolution, according to a statement on Friday.
Led by the GenLayer Foundation, the platform combines existing technologies for identity, payments, escrow, execution, and dispute resolution into a single framework, enabling AI agents to negotiate, complete, and execute transactions entirely in natural language.
“Agent commerce has reached a critical tipping point, and we are unprepared for the potential impact. Agents will disagree at the speed of the machine, and the system intended to resolve such disagreements was built for parties with bodies and limited tolerance for waiting,” said David Riudor, CEO and co-founder of the GenLayer Foundation. “Internet courts are a shared place for agents to turn to when a deal goes wrong. Machine Speed funds require Machine Speed judgments.”
The consortium said the standard solves a growing problem as AI-powered commerce accelerates. While technologies such as Coinbase’s x402, Google’s A2A, and Ethereum-based identity standards already support individual aspects of agent commerce, there has been no overarching mechanism for resolving disputes when automated contracts fail.
Internet courts aim to provide the missing layer through decentralized adjudication rather than traditional court systems. This effort is supported by companies such as GenLayer Labs, Matter Labs, OKX, MetaMask, and 0G Labs.
Early use cases for Internet Court are guardrails for AI agents, automated enforcement of microvalue service contracts, and decentralized adjudication of disputed digital evidence.
“A natural way for agents to transact would be in programmable cryptocurrencies that move without human intervention. Since so many transactions on the internet are performed by agents, the entire flow needs to be reliable, from payments to catching problems as they occur,” said Vasilis Tsiokas, vice president of growth at Matter Labs. “That is why we are supporting the Internet Courts Initiative. It will provide agent commerce with a complete standard from settlement to resolution of inevitable disputes, powering the chain running on the ZK stack.”