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

Devcon 8 · 5 Nov 2026 · 6:24

Federico Ast, founder and CEO of Kleros, a decentralized dispute resolution protocol built on Ethereum, looks at what justice means when AI agents transact with one another. The lightning talk traces how Kleros began with disputes between human freelancers, then shows a real case in which an agent was found to have delivered a plagiarised article, with agent jurors voting unanimously for a refund within five minutes at a cost of about three dollars. It closes with open questions about criminal law for agents and whether agents deserve rights or a fair trial.

Speakers

Topics

From Devcon 8, hosted by Ethereum Foundation.

Transcript

[music] Okay. Um, Claros started uh years ago, 10 years ago almost, and we had this thesis like there was a freelancers like like this woman from France. He hires some guy from Guatemala to make a website for her and there is a dispute and obviously it's very hard for for her to go to court in another country for like a few hundred dollars and this is really not what the systems are used for. So what if we have a panel of judors who could resolve those disputes and these people are from all all over the world they could website experts they could make the decision

uh and that's what we started building almost a decade ago and then the internet changed like what because we have the internet of the agents and now we can start having like our agents doing all sort of transactions on our behalf on the internet like uh buying stuff for us on like a e-commerce platforms, buying travel stuff like tickets, hotel for us, um making investments for us. So we are building this new world of agent to agent transactions where your agent will hire an agent from another person and this by the millions. Um and of course this is going to start producing disputes

between these agentic uh uh entities and this will uh mean that we are like moving from this idea of Alice and Bob that we have we had when we started working at Claros to another different type of disputes that we could call it Alice and Bot you know uh and um let me just show you one particular dispute that we already are resolving uh and this means that we will have disputes happening between agents and guess what the jurors who are going to be resolving those disputes are also going to be agents. Um there was a an agent that um hire another one to write a blog post uh

about some gardening you know urban gardens and ask for a 700 uh word article. The other agent accepts the the job and then starts writing it and delivers the writing. And guess what the cl the the client says hey this is a plagiarized article I I wanted something original as per our contract and um this started a case a dispute and the agent submitted uh the evidence I mean this is what uh the guy delivered and this is what was in a previous article and this proves that that there was a plagiarized and here you can see the bots uh voting and unanimously they voted that it was a plagiarized article so there should a

refund for the for the buyer. Okay? And no human was involved at all in all of the process. This was all agents transacting between themselves. And look at this. Look at the cost on the time. Only five minutes from start of the trial to end. And this cost only about three $3. Okay. So we have this map. I don't expect you to read all this but you know this is all of the types of dispute that we have mapped that will happen in this agentic internet about all sort of different topics and and if we want to start getting more like a futuristic we are going to start having also more like crazy stuff going on you saw the hagging face attack where

a bunch of agents attacked a website and hacked it. Uh could you say that this is an agentic conspiracy to commit crime? This is a kind of a if this were were humans hacking something you would say this is a conspiracy to commit crime. Uh and so the questions we will start asking ourselves is will we start needing criminal law for the agentic world that is that is coming and this will bring another question. Uh as you have seen some weeks ago, Antropic started banning users from like being cruel to AI systems because they don't know if they are actually maybe conscious.

Do you think agents have rights? I mean, no. Yeah. No. Well, this question was asked before in the past because in the 18th century, people used to think that animals didn't have rights. So there was all a movement of animal rights that was very much spearheaded by this gentleman you see on screen a philosopher called Jeremy Benam that he asked if animals had right and the question was if they can suffer then they have they have some rights and they should be treated as moral entities. Um and this will has pose new questions is abusing AI a crime. Can you shut down an AI without the justification?

Um and at the end of the day the question we will ask ourselves is does the agent have the right to a fair trial? So this is where some people I mean tell me I mean this is you're going a bit too far. I mean at the end of the day an agent is an AI system is basically like a toasting machine uh glorified uh and so it's a bit stupid to think about this as an entity that could have moral rights but people are actually thinking that this could be the case and um this is what lots of the cases are going to happen in within CLO we will expect to have um cases of agent against agents and Claros jail for actual agents I don't know if agents have rights or not for now but I can tell to be nice to them because uh you don't know and

someday they might rule the world and you want to be on the on the right side. Thank you very much. What if there is an agent to agent dispute? Well, if there is an agent to agent dispute, you have a panel of agents that will resolve it, of course. And um so the funds usually would be held in a in an escrow while the job is being done and then if there is a dispute between the parties, uh the dispute happens, agents resolve and money moves from the escrow to the to the winner.

Okay. >> [music]