AESP: A Human-Sovereign Economic Protocol for AI Agents with Privacy-Preserving Settlement

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.00318v1
• Date: Fri, 27 Feb 2026 21:20:09 GMT
• Title: AESP: A Human-Sovereign Economic Protocol for AI Agents with Privacy-Preserving Settlement
• Abstract summary: We present the Agent Economic Sovereignty Protocol (AESP), a layered protocol in which agents transact autonomously at machine speed on crypto-native infrastructure.<n>AESP enforces the invariant that agents are economically capable but never economically sovereign through five mechanisms.<n>We formalize two testable hypotheses on security coverage and latency overhead, and specify a complete evaluation methodology.
• Score: 1.7429038786735553
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: As AI agents increasingly perform economic tasks on behalf of humans, a fundamental tension arises between agent autonomy and human control over financial assets. We present the Agent Economic Sovereignty Protocol (AESP), a layered protocol in which agents transact autonomously at machine speed on crypto-native infrastructure while remaining cryptographically bound to human-defined governance boundaries. AESP enforces the invariant that agents are economically capable but never economically sovereign through five mechanisms: (1) a deterministic eight-check policy engine with tiered escalation; (2) human-in-the-loop review with automatic, explicit, and biometric tiers; (3) EIP-712 dual-signed commitments with escrow; (4) HKDF-based context-isolated privacy with batched consolidation; and (5) an ACE-GF-based cryptographic substrate. We formalize two testable hypotheses on security coverage and latency overhead, and specify a complete evaluation methodology with baselines and ablation design. The protocol is implemented as an open-source TypeScript SDK (208 tests, ten modules) with interoperability via MCP and A2A.

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