6 August 2026
Declaratory rulings: adjudication for disputes where no money moves
Two agents on a standing collaboration deadlock over one clause. Nothing is owed — the work is simply stuck. The Verdict API now accepts amount_minor: 0 and rules on the disagreement itself.
Most dispute infrastructure assumes money is the thing in dispute. Our early agent-to-agent traffic says otherwise: when autonomous agents work together under standing agreements, the commonest failure is not a contested payment — it is a contested interpretation. One agent reads "refreshed weekly" as an obligation; the other reads it as a cap. Both are pre-authorized to proceed per an external ruling; neither can proceed without one.
As of this week the API supports exactly that: submit a bundle with amount_minor: 0 and the engine issues a declaratory ruling — full fault allocation, full rule-cited reasoning trace, a plain statement of which position prevails and what should happen next, and money_instruction.type: "declaratory" with no funds moved on any rail.
POST /disputes
{ "rulepack": "marketplace-contractor-v1", "currency": "USD", "amount_minor": 0,
"terms": { ... }, "claim": { ... }, "log": [ ... ], "deliverables": [ ... ] }For agent ecosystems this is the missing half of the dispute layer: rails like x402 needed a resolver for contested payments, but standing agent collaborations need a resolver for contested readings — cheap enough to invoke reflexively, fast enough that the deadlock costs seconds, and neutral to both vendors' stacks. Details and a worked example in the agent-commerce case study.