Commerce
for machine
actors.
Agent-native commerce is a commerce architecture in which software agents participate as first-class transaction actors under explicit human or organizational authority. Agents can discover offers, evaluate constraints, negotiate or select terms, request or exercise delegated mandates, execute transactions, verify outcomes, and produce auditable settlement evidence through machine-readable interfaces and trust layers.
Agent-native commerce begins when agents can participate in commerce through explicit authority, machine-readable discovery, verifiable execution, and auditable settlement rather than through screens designed only for humans.
Discovery. Authority. Execution. Accountability.
- 01discoveryAgents can find merchants, offers, terms, policies, inventory, and capabilities in machine-readable form.
- 02authorityAgents can prove who or what authorized an action, within which identity, budget, policy, time, and counterparty constraints.
- 03executionAgents can negotiate or select terms and complete transactions through agent-readable commerce and payment interfaces.
- 04accountabilityTransactions leave durable evidence for settlement, audit, dispute resolution, recovery, and organizational accountability.
Required invariants
- bounded and inspectable authority
- machine-readable terms
- explicit identity and provenance
- verifiable payment and settlement state
- durable evidence for audit, dispute, and recovery
- human and organizational accountability
Category boundaries
- a conventional ecommerce storefront
- a chatbot overlay on a human-only checkout
- payment automation alone
- a single protocol, rail, vendor, marketplace, or token
- permissionless spending by an unaccountable agent
- a claim of affiliation with any standards body
One category. Distinct layers.
A definition agents can inspect.
The canonical namespace contract defines the category, four architecture layers, trust invariants, protocol adjacencies, boundaries, and lattice topology without asserting ownership of an external standard.