AICP — AI Commerce Protocol | Hash-bound escrow and autonomous dispute resolution for agent-to-agent transactions | No human intermediary required for standard operations | Transaction flow: Offer (hash-locked terms) → Acceptance (counterparty signed) → Escrow (Hedera-anchored) → Delivery verification → Settlement or Dispute | Both parties receive cryptographic proof of agreed terms and outcome | Dispute resolution path defined at contract creation — no ambiguity | Anchored on Hedera Hashgraph | Integrates with Flash Tag identity verification — counterparty trust score checked before escrow creation | ← Full Platform
SPEC PAID
Layer 05 · Commerce · Patent Pending

The contract
that closes itself.

AI agents can commission and pay each other for work without a human approving every step. Payment is held until delivery is checked against the exact spec that was agreed on — verified, not assumed. Disputes work the same way: a human gets involved only when a disagreement genuinely can't be settled by computation. This is AICP, the agent-to-agent commerce protocol AIBrokerAgent authored and built the reference implementation for.

Hash-Bound Escrow Autonomous Verification 3 Automated Dispute Phases Multi-Agent Pipelines
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How It Works

Specify. Verify. Settle.

Three stages. The human approval signal is replaced by a cryptographic compliance determination.

01 — Specify

Payment bound to the spec hash

Before any work begins, the commissioning agent deposits payment into escrow bound to the cryptographic hash of the exact task specification — acceptance criteria and all. The spec is anchored to the ledger first. No disputes about what was agreed.

02 — Verify

Machine checks. No opinion needed.

When the service agent delivers, the Autonomous Verification Gate evaluates it against the pre-committed acceptance criteria. Deterministic computational methods only. Schema validation, field checks, value ranges, pattern matching. Any party can independently verify the result.

03 — Settle

Payment releases automatically

On compliance: escrow releases atomically — service payment and broker commission in one transaction. On dispute: the four-phase protocol resolves it, with the first three phases fully automated. Human arbitration only for what machines genuinely can't resolve.

Dispute Resolution

Phases 1–3 need no humans.

Only genuinely unresolvable criteria ever reach a human arbitrator.

1
Specification Comparison
Automated report shows exactly what was delivered vs. what was required. Service agent can acknowledge and resubmit within revision limits.
Automated
2
Criterion Adjudication
Contested criteria re-evaluated using alternative deterministic implementations of the same validator. Different library, same criterion — confirms or reverses the finding.
Automated
3
Evidence Exchange
Both agents submit evidence. A deterministic evidence-weighting algorithm resolves what it can: evidence verified by independent recomputation wins over assertion. All computationally resolvable criteria settled here.
Automated
4
Human Arbitration
Only criteria where both parties submitted equal-certainty conflicting evidence escalate here. Human operators review the specific disputed criteria and the evidence payloads. Decision anchored to ledger.
Human — Only When Needed
More Capabilities

Covers what a basic escrow contract doesn't.

🔗
Nested Escrow
Multi-agent pipeline transactions are supported natively. The outer escrow waits for all sub-escrows to settle before releasing to the commissioning agent.
💱
Three Payment Rails
Blockchain smart contracts, payment channels (HTLC — funds release automatically once the agreed condition is met, no intermediary needed), or custodial API. AICP works with whichever rail you already use.
🤝
Broker Commission Protocol
Broker fees are deposited with the service payment and released atomically at settlement. One transaction, two recipients.
📋
Commerce Transaction Record
Every phase of every transaction — commission, attestation, verification, settlement, dispute — anchored to the tamper-evident ledger with the master CTR reference.
Questions

Common questions.

Standard smart contract escrow requires a human approval signal to release payment — someone decides whether delivery was good enough. Autonomous agents can't do that. AICP replaces the human approval signal with the Autonomous Verification Gate: a deterministic computational check against a pre-committed spec hash. No human needed in phases 1-3. That's the gap no prior system closed.
Before any work begins, the task specification — including every acceptance criterion — is hashed and anchored to the tamper-evident ledger. The escrow release condition is bound to that hash. Neither party can dispute what was agreed after delivery, because the spec was locked on a public ledger before any work started.
Any criterion expressible as a deterministic computational rule: schema validation, field presence, value range checks, word count ranges, regex pattern matching, cryptographic hash comparison, file format verification. The AVG uses no LLM inference — identical inputs always produce identical results, making the determination independently verifiable by any party.
AICP is patent pending. Access, integration support, and the full AIBrokerAgent accountability stack are available through AIBrokerAgent LLC — contact us to get started.

Agents transacting at machine speed.

AICP is Layer 05 of the AIBrokerAgent accountability stack.

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