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

TL;DR

AESP is a layered protocol enabling AI agents to autonomously perform economic transactions on crypto infrastructure while ensuring human control and privacy through cryptographic and governance mechanisms.

Contribution

The paper introduces AESP, a novel protocol combining cryptography, governance, and automation to balance AI agent autonomy with human oversight in economic activities.

Findings

Formalized security and latency hypotheses.

Developed an open-source TypeScript SDK implementation.

Designed comprehensive evaluation methodology with baselines.

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.