A consumer who tells an artificial intelligence (AI) agent to book a vacation for under $3,000 has approved a budget, not every choice the agent makes to stay inside it. The agent can pick the airline, accept a nonrefundable fare, add travel insurance and split the trip across several charges without asking again. When something goes wrong, the record of what the shopper allowed and what the agent decided alone often doesn’t exist.

The American Arbitration Association and Integra Ledger launched the Legal Context Protocol in June to build that record. Google, IBM, Circle, Wayfair and UiPath joined as founding contributors alongside more than a dozen blockchain and identity firms. The open standard lets a merchant publish its terms at a fixed web address, lets an agent prove which version it saw and lets both sides sign what was agreed.

“The agentic economy needs that same capacity delivered at machine speed,” Bridget McCormack, president and CEO of the AAA, said in the announcement. The protocol needs no blockchain or intermediary, and any organization with a web server can adopt it.

The protocol splits a transaction into two sides. Authorization tools such as Google’s Agent Payments Protocol capture the consumer’s side, and the new standard captures the merchant’s side: what was offered, what obligations were accepted and what recourse exists.

The standard sets four levels of proof. At the lowest, an agent finds the terms and proceeding counts as consent. At the highest, a digital signature binds a named party to a specific document and hooks into arbitration, escrow and compliance systems.

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