‘Internet Court’ launched to mediate disagreements between AI agents without human involvement

A consortium of 27 companies announced on July 10 that they would launch the Internet Court, an open standard for speedy dispute resolution between AI agents.

The standard is specifically designed so that AI agents involved in transactions on behalf of individuals or businesses have an interoperable framework in which they can negotiate with each other, hold funds safely and resolve disputes quickly and cheaply without the need for human interference.

The consortium is composed of a variety of prominent blockchain players, such as cryptocurrency exchange company OKX, software engineering company Matter Labs and technology company 0G Labs.

Led by GenLayer Foundation, which aims to build the adjudication layer for the agentic economy, the Internet Court intends to integrate previously fragmented protocols pertaining to payments, escrow and dispute resolution into one framework.

AI agents are already negotiating with and paying each other without human involvement, especially in the U.S. Adobe (ADBE ) data reported that a 4,700% year-over-year increase in generative AI traffic to U.S. retail sites was recorded in July 2025.

McKinsey also estimates that AI agents will mediate at least $3 to $5 trillion USD in consumer commerce globally by 2030. But, as with human-to-human transactions, agent-to-agent transactions will likely run into contractual disagreements.

However, agentic systems have thus far had no way to settle these disputes as traditional courts are slow and ill-equipped to handle such cases.

Already, agentic disputes are becoming a feature of modern commerce; a Cloud Security Alliance Survey revealed that 65% of enterprises which run AI agents reported an AI agent-related incident in the 12 months leading up to April 2026.

Internet Court pre-empts surge in agentic commerce and looks to prevent unnecessary legal and transactional delays

David Riudor, CEO and co-founder of the GenLayer Foundation, spoke to Unite AI about how the court functions and the purpose it intends to serve.

“When we pushed this consortium of the Internet Court, what we were trying to do was unite the leaders of the agentic economy companies, from payments to identity to settlement layers – with us as the dispute resolution layer – into a single consortium”, the founder explained.

The result of this unification is the creation of a “skill that can be sent to an agent, which that agent will then be able to use in a composable way to do a complete end-to-end transaction, not only the payment per se”.

For agentic commerce to be efficient, the speed of the transaction should be matched by the speed of dispute resolution between agents, which need access to standardized guidance on compliance in order to prevent a legal dispute that needs ‘human’ oversight.

Currently, courts take an average of 344 days to resolve complex civil disputes in the US. Those courts, Riudor argues, are ill-prepared for the coming multi-trillion dollar agentic commerce economy, in which “each human … has one agent, or maybe dozens of agents, or maybe hundreds of agents doing tasks” and potentially encountering contractual disputes with other agents.

GenLayer, which Riudor describes as “a kind of adjudication layer for the internet economy”,   is therefore leveraging its expertise in online dispute resolution to ensure that Internet Court provides agentic actors with the information necessary to quickly, cheaply and safely resolve contractual issues in order to circumvent the use of slow traditional courts.

Internet Court is not currently legally binding in any jurisdiction, but its rulings can bind the funds held in escrow pre-dispute.

In case of a dispute, the court’s protocol is activated and a jury of 1001 rotating AI validators reviews the contracts, looks at the evidence and makes an adjudication. The funds held are then released or redirected depending on the outcome of the verdict.

This process takes between 30 minutes and an hour, with resolution prices ranging from $0.85 to $1.45, a far cry from the price of hiring a lawyer.

One of the other key issues that the Internet Court would address, according to Riudor, is delay associated with fragmentation between the various players of the agentic economy.

“You have solutions for moving money from point A to point B, like NEAR, you have solutions for identity verification, like Billions, then there are partners, like KLEROS, for deciding if something happened or not on a contract”.

These companies, however, use their own websites and APIs, whereas Internet Court allows a user to “go directly to the website, directly download the skill … [and] you automatically have all the partners mapped there, with all the documentation and their APIs”.

Given that each of the consortium members’ protocol is embedded within Internet Court, the program, if successful, could provide the first full-stack option for agentic contracts, with each partner dealing with one specific layer of the commerce stack, from identification all the way through to adjudication.

However, GenLayer’s model is not the only competitor on the market, as the American Arbitration Association (AAA)  announced the launch of its Legal Context Protocol – another standardized agent-to-agent protocol for commerce – last month.

The back-to-back launch of the two competing standards appears to show that the projected accelerated growth of the agentic economy has triggered a race to become that economy’s trusted infrastructure.