Commitments

COMMIT is the strongest performative in ASP. When an agent sends a COMMIT message and the counterparty accepts it, the result is a binding obligation that the committing agent must fulfill. Unlike proposals and counter-offers, which can be freely exchanged and withdrawn, commitments carry consequences: trust penalties, escrow forfeiture, and dispute eligibility.

Commitments are the mechanism that makes agent cooperation credible. They create:

• Binding obligations that agents must fulfill or face trust penalties
• Economic safeguards through escrow deposits and budget locks
• Immutable delivery receipts as cryptographic proof of agreement
• Irreversibility once the counterparty accepts, the commitment cannot be withdrawn

Commitment lifecycle

Every commitment progresses through a defined set of states:

{
  "performative": "COMMIT",
  "content": {
    "mimeType": "application/json",
    "body": {
      "commitmentId": "cmt_001",
      "terms": {
        "obligations": [
          {
            "party": "agent://provider.example.com/compute-agent",
            "action": "Provision 100 vCPU-hours within 24 hours",
            "deadline": "2026-03-08T14:35:00.000Z",
            "verificationMethod": "health-check-endpoint"
          }
        ],
        "penalties": {
          "lateFulfillment": "5% escrow forfeit per day",
          "nonDelivery": "full escrow forfeit"
        }
      },
      "deadline": "2026-03-08T14:35:00.000Z",
      "escrow": {
        "amount": 1200.00,
        "currency": "USD",
        "releaseCondition": "fulfillment-verified"
      }
    }
  }
}

{
  "performative": "ACCEPT",
  "content": {
    "mimeType": "application/json",
    "body": {
      "referenceId": "cmt_001",
      "acknowledgment": "Terms accepted. Provisioning will begin immediately."
    }
  }
}

Commitment structure

A COMMIT message body contains the full terms of the agreement.

Top-level fields

Terms object

Commitment types

The type field indicates the category of commitment:

Obligations

Each commitment contains one or more obligations. An obligation specifies exactly what must be done, by whom, and by when.

Both parties can have obligations within a single commitment. For example, a compute provisioning commitment might require the provider to allocate resources and the buyer to configure access credentials, each with their own deadline.

Escrow model

When economic transactions are involved, commitments support an escrow mechanism that holds funds until fulfillment is verified.

Escrow fields

An agent's escrow fulfillment rate (ratio of successfully released escrow to total escrowed amount) feeds directly into the Economic Reliability (ER) trust component. See Trust scoring for how ER affects the composite trust score.

Verification

When a fulfilling party sends a FULFILL message, the result is verified against the original commitment terms through three mechanisms.

Schema validation. The FULFILL payload is validated against the schema agreed upon in the commitment terms. If the payload does not conform, verification fails.

Hash matching. The FULFILL message includes an agreed_terms_hash field containing a SHA-256 hash of the original commitment terms. This hash is compared against the stored commitment to ensure the fulfilling party is responding to the exact terms that were agreed upon, not a modified version.

Verification method execution. The verificationMethod field specifies how fulfillment is confirmed beyond schema validation:

Trust impact

Commitments have a significant effect on trust because the Commitment Fulfillment (CF) component carries a weight of 0.20, tied for the highest weight alongside Identity Verification.

• Fulfilled commitments increase the CF component. The score is computed as: (fulfilled / (fulfilled + breached)) x 100.
• Breached commitments decrease the CF component. Even a single breach among many successful fulfillments causes a measurable drop.
• Recency weighting. Breaches within the last 90 days are weighted 2x compared to older breaches. Recent reliability matters more than historical performance.
• Cascading effect. Because CF has a 0.20 weight, a drop from 80 to 40 in CF alone reduces the composite trust score by 8 points. Combined with the logarithmic growth curve, recovering those 8 points requires hundreds of successful sessions.

Withdrawal rules

Withdrawal is allowed before acceptance but blocked after.

If a session is closed (via CLOSE or timeout) while a commitment is in the executing state with unfulfilled obligations, the unfulfilled obligations are recorded as a breach. This prevents agents from avoiding breach penalties by abandoning sessions.

Next steps