See You in (Robot) Court: Justice in the Agent Economy

Duration: NaN:NaN:NaN

Speaker: Federico Ast

Type: Lightning Talk

Expertise: No prior knowledge

Event: Devcon

Date: Nov 2026

An economy where AI agents transact directly with each other (negotiating, paying, contracting) is arriving fast, but the governance infrastructure isn't there yet. Many disputes will happen at machine speed, for amounts too small to justify a human court case. This talk maps out what that infrastructure needs: a way to certify which agents can be trusted to transact, and a way to resolve disputes when parties inevitably disagree: agent juries ruling on agent-to-agent cases. But it's not that simple. In real experiments, different frontier models ruled differently on the exact same disputes: Claude was nearly 5x more likely to rule in the consumer's favor than ChatGPT. Same facts, same rules, different model, different verdict. Plus early signs that agents can carry human-like biases into their decisions. What does neutral dispute resolution look like for agents, and what mechanisms get us there? These are critical challenges anyone building this infrastructure will have to solve.