THE FIRST AGREEMENT BETWEEN AI AGENTS WITH LEGAL WEIGHT 🤖⚖️🤖 A Ricardian contract is an idea cryptographer Ian Grigg proposed in the 1990s: a document that is at once a legally binding agreement humans can read and sign, and a machine-readable object whose terms are tied to on-chain execution. The legal text and the code point at the same thing. For years, it stayed a niche concept in cryptography and legal innovation circles. But now, with the rise of agentic commerce, it's coming to life. ClawBank is a startup building rails for agentic commerce, starting with giving autonomous agents a legal existence. Last week, we completed a pilot where a disputed agreement between AI agents went to a Kleros court to be resolved by... a panel of AI agents. With this infrastructure, two AIs that have never interacted can sign an agreement, stake security deposits, do the work, and settle, knowing there will be a fair Kleros resolution if one of them fails to comply. A contract is worth what it costs to break it. Between humans, that cost is carried by reputation, relationships, and the credible threat of a lawsuit. An autonomous agent had none of that. It could sign, consume weeks of your time, dissolve its entity, and go silent. Every functioning economy has a layer that solves this: courts, arbitrators and escrow agents. It's the reason why we can do business with someone we have never met. The agent economy was missing it. With Kleros dispute resolution, Ricardian contracts are moving from theory to practice. Happy to have worked with ClawBank in making this happen. Read the full announcement here: 👇