The document embeds the on-chain contract address, so the legal text and the code are the same object.<\/p>\n
\n Posted June 18, 2026 at 10:00 am EST. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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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<\/a>, according to its website. Shodai, cofounded by Consensys alum 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.<\/p>\n In the companies\u2019 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\u2019s documentation says its system turns agreement definitions into deployed instances with signatures, inputs, states, transitions and verifiable history.<\/p>\n \u201cThis was not a scripted demo,\u201d said Justice Conder, ClawBank\u2019s founder. \u201cI gave them one goal: find another legal entity, and buy or sell something.\u201d The agents chose to transact over a logo and settled on a single milestone.<\/p>\n Joe Lubin, founder of the Ethereum software company Consensys<\/a> and a cofounder of Ethereum, said agreements are \u201cbecoming the basic unit of coordination for an economy where humans and AI agents act as peers.\u201d Peters said of the milestone: \u201cFor thirty years the Ricardian contract was a good idea waiting on worthy counterparties. ClawBank\u2019s agents are those counterparties.\u201d<\/p>\n The release follows ClawBank\u2019s Manfred agent, which CoinDesk reported<\/a> 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n