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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.00318 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00318/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03741/) (2017)
- [Intelligent AI Delegation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11865/) (2026)
- [Autonomous Agents on Blockchains: Standards, Execution Models, and Trust Boundaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04583/) (2026)
- [AgentGuardian: Learning Access Control Policies to Govern AI Agent Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10440/) (2026)
- [Trustless Autonomy: Understanding Motivations, Benefits, and Governance Dilemmas in Self-Sovereign Decentralized AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09757/) (2025)
- [The Agent Economy: A Blockchain-Based Foundation for Autonomous AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14219/) (2026)
- [Sovereign Agents: Towards Infrastructural Sovereignty and Diffused Accountability in Decentralized AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14951/) (2026)
- [AI, Global Governance, and Digital Sovereignty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17481/) (2024)
- [Toward Safe and Responsible AI Agents: A Three-Pillar Model for Transparency, Accountability, and Trustworthiness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06223/) (2026)
- [SoK: Trusting Self-Sovereign Identity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06729/) (2024)
- [Securing AI Agents: Implementing Role-Based Access Control for Industrial Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11431/) (2025)
- [Solving the Buyer and Seller's Dilemma: A Dual-Deposit Escrow Smart Contract for Provably Cheat-Proof Delivery and Payment for a Digital Good without a Trusted Mediator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08379/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [SoK: Security of Autonomous LLM Agents in Agentic Commerce](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15367/) (2026)
- [Economy of Minds: Emerging Multi-Agent Intelligence with Economic Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02859/) (2026)
- [Internalising the Identity Primitive: Cryptographic Individuality for an Autonomous Agent on a Public Blockchain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.02986/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.