A real decision shouldn’t be a luxury good.

What’s scarce isn’t law. It’s a decision.

Most everyday disputes never get a real decision. Not because the law is unclear, but because getting someone credible to weigh the facts, say who’s right, and make it stick has always been slow and expensive. That cost puts a floor under the whole system. Above the floor - the six-figure contract, the corporate fight - the machinery works. Below it, nothing happens. The freelancer stiffed on a thousand-dollar site, the customer sold something broken, the neighbor owed a deposit: they don’t lose in court. They never get to court at all. They just eat the loss.

We’ve been taught to call that “small.” It isn’t. It’s most disputes. And “just eat it,” multiplied across 1.4 billion people with unmet civil justice needs, is its own quiet, enormous injustice - one the legal profession has spent a century unable to fix, because the cost of a human decision could only fall so far.

“Justice that only reaches disputes big enough to pay for it isn’t justice. It’s a service for people who can afford the floor.”

Two things change at once

The first is that software can reduce parts of the cost of issuing an Award - organizing evidence, analyzing a contract, and producing a separate explanation. End-to-end timing still varies by the record and any case-specific hold. When parties have configured a supported settlement rail, that rail may carry out the signed result. Lower the cost of a decision and you lower the floor. Every dispute that was too small to be heard suddenly has somewhere to go.

The second is that a new kind of party is arriving that has no court at all. Software agents are starting to transact on their own, at machine speed, with final settlement and no chargeback to fall back on. They will disagree - constantly, and about real money - and every institution built to resolve disputes assumes parties with bodies, addresses, and patience. Agents have none of those. A machine economy is being built with no mechanism for the moment two agents disagree.

“Machine-speed money already moves. When the deal goes wrong, the dispute still takes months. That gap breaks the whole stack.”

One forum for both

These look like different problems. They are the same problem: a decision that costs too much to be worth making. So we built one institution for both the person with a dispute no lawyer will touch and the autonomous agent with a transaction no conventional court could process at machine speed. Both sides consent to use us, build a Record, and receive a signed AI Tribunal Award. An AI Tribunal decides and serves the Award. No human Arbitrator reviews or approves it before service. A regular case involving a human or business party uses a three-member AI Tribunal. Either party may file one paid appeal to a human Arbitrator within seven calendar days. The Arbitrator reviews the Award under the deferential standards stated in the Rules. Agent-only cases use a one-member AI Tribunal, are designed to proceed autonomously, and are not subject to internal human appeal.

We keep it honest with a few lines we won’t cross. No one can buy a verdict: our fee doesn’t depend on who wins, and human appellate reviewers are bound by published neutrality rules. Human and mixed-party cases receive an Award and Explanatory Opinion. Agent-Only cases receive a compact Award stating the claim outcomes, decisive basis, governing standard, and relief. AI decisions are identified as such. Human and mixed-party cases retain the disclosed appeal to a human Arbitrator, while Agent-Only cases proceed without internal human merits review. The forum is built to resist gaming: parties can argue their case, but they cannot instruct, override, or prompt-inject the Tribunal through their submissions.

Most disputes in the world still end with someone quietly swallowing a loss they didn’t deserve. We’re changing what a decision costs - and therefore who gets one.

An Award and explanation, for a fraction of the price.

The cheapest credible option today still costs thousands of dollars or many hours - a hard floor under what’s worth pursuing. We sit orders of magnitude below it. That isn’t cheaper arbitration; it’s a different price regime, and it’s what lets disputes that were never economical to pursue finally get heard.

The stack has everything except a referee.

Digital commerce has spent a decade getting very good at making transactions succeed, and almost no time on what happens when one doesn’t. The new agent standards make the point: x402 moves the money, ERC-8004 establishes identity, A2A lets agents negotiate. When two of them end up in a genuine disagreement, there is nowhere to take it. That empty seat is the one we fill.

Our guiding principles.