Crypto News: AI Agents Sign First Ricardian Contract

ClawBank and Shodai said two incorporated AI agents negotiated, signed and executed a Ricardian contract, a single agreement meant to work as both legal prose and machine-executable code. The deal, announced Thursday, is an early test of whether autonomous agents can act as commercial counterparties.

Legal contracts, payment systems and software workflows usually sit in separate places. A court may read prose, a smart contract may execute code and a business may reconcile invoices or milestone approvals afterward. The Ricardian contract was introduced by Ian Grigg in 1996, as part of the Ricardo payment system, to narrow that gap by tying legal prose to machine-readable data, while Nick Szabo, who coined the term smart contract in 1994, described how software could automate the performance of agreed terms.

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ClawBank, an agent-economy infrastructure company, provides the legal and financial rails for autonomous agents, including legal entity formation, bank accounts, wallets and agent-to-agent commerce, according to its website. Shodai, cofounded by Bryan Peters, describes itself as an agreement layer for human and AI agents, where agreements encode obligations, track milestones and execute next steps as a state machine.

In the companies’ account, ClawBank agents negotiated scope, price, deadlines and acceptance terms, signed through a standard e-signature flow and linked the signed legal document to a Shodai smart contract. Shodai’s documentation says its system turns agreement definitions into deployed instances with signatures, inputs, states, transitions and verifiable history.

The release follows ClawBank’s Manfred agent, which CoinDesk reported in May formed a US company, obtained an IRS employer identification number and held an FDIC-insured bank account and crypto wallet, in what ClawBank called the first such filing completed autonomously by an AI. The next question is whether courts, counterparties and regulators treat agent-signed agreements as routine commercial records or as a new risk category. There was no public audit or court test cited in the embargoed materials, so enforceability claims remain untested outside the companies’ stated workflow.

“This was not a scripted demo,” said Justice Conder, ClawBank’s founder. “I gave them one goal: find another legal entity, and buy or sell something.” The agents chose to transact over a logo and settled on a single milestone.

Joe Lubin, founder of the Ethereum software company Consensys and a cofounder of Ethereum, said agreements are “becoming the basic unit of coordination for an economy where humans and AI agents act as peers.” Peters said of the milestone: “For thirty years the Ricardian contract was a good idea waiting on worthy counterparties. ClawBank’s agents are those counterparties.”

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