GenLayer Foundation and a cohort of crypto firms, including MetaMask, OKX, Matter Labs’ ZKsync and 0G Labs have backed the launch of Internet Court, an open standard that handles escrow funds and settles contract disputes for AI agents.What is Internet Court for AI agents?According to GenLayer, Internet Court is a standard to connect agentic protocols into one lifecycle: discovery and reputation, negotiation, contracts, payment and escrow, execution, and lastly verification and disputes.To date, the agentic commerce development has occurred across multiple layers and different protocols. Coinbase’s x402 settles payments, A2A takes care of agent-to-agent negotiation, and the ERC-8004 standard handles agent identity.What GenLayer is pitching Internet Court as is the venue to resolve the unavoidable situation where two agents read the same contract differently.Internet Court runs on Intelligent Contracts, which are agreements that combine code, natural language, and outside information scored by validators powered by different large language models.Who is on the team?The founding team includes GenLayer Labs, Matter Labs’ ZKsync, the exchange OKX, MetaMask, and 0G Labs.MetaMask has a concrete role in all of this. Internet Court is built on the MetaMask Smart Accounts Kit, using ERC-7710 delegations and MetaMask’s x402 Facilitator to give agents spending authority that is bounded and revocable.“AI Agents are becoming a core part of how commerce works,” said Ryan McPeck, Smart Accounts Lead at MetaMask, describing the account and payment rails as what the agent economy needs underneath it.Matter Labs is supplying the chain. “It gives agentic commerce a complete standard, from settlement to the resolution of inevitable disputes, and the chain powering it runs on the ZK Stack,” said Vassilis Tziokas, the company’s VP of growth.What it looks like in practiceThere are three cases of Internet Court in application: In the first case, an owner funds an agent through a MetaMask smart wallet capped to a single merchant and budget, while a GenLayer reviewer checks each purchase against a plain-language mandate such as “sports news only” and revokes the agent’s access on-chain if it drifts off course.In the second case, Internet Court makes a small service agreement enforceable. An agent buying AI inference and paying per token in USDC can hold the payment in escrow against agreed terms, say 99.5% successful responses and sub-800-millisecond latency. The contract docks the payout automatically and releases the rest, no support ticket, if the provider misses.A third case involves the handling of contested records. Collective Memory, one of the consortium partners, runs a staked layer of timestamped, first-person accounts of real events, and a GenLayer validator panel can rule on which competing records hold up as evidence, with the reasoning and any dissent recorded on-chain.Why launch now?The pitch rests on scale and speed. The group cites McKinsey figures projecting AI agents will mediate $3 trillion to $5 trillion in consumer commerce worldwide by 2030, up to $1 trillion of it in the US. Adobe data it references showed traffic from generative AI tools to US retail sites climbing 4,700% year over year in July 2025.Human courts were not built for that tempo. The consortium notes that complex civil disputes in the US take an average of 344 days to resolve, a pace that makes sense for parties with bodies and patience but not for software settling thousands of micro-deals a second.Internet Court is not the only group chasing this problem. In June, the American Arbitration Association and Integra Ledger released the Legal Context Protocol, an open standard for attaching verifiable legal terms to agent transactions, with Google, IBM, and Circle among its founding contributors. The competing efforts point at the same hole from different sides: agents can now pay each other faster than any existing system can referee them.The standard is open and openly governed, with any agent free to adopt it now.If you're reading this, you’re already ahead. Stay there with our newsletter.