Signed, Not Seen: The evidence nobody is required to carry

Abstract

Between September 2025 and April 2026, five specifications made identity, authority, intent, and payment authorization portable in agentic commerce. Read the schemas rather than the announcements, and the same two things are missing from every one of them: what a human did with a model’s output, and which model produced it. This paper argues that the absence may persist rather than close, because whoever supplies the format in which such a record is recognized would hold a position from which to charge for reliance itself. That is offered as a hypothesis and tested against correspondent banking, the published accounts of firms that already have verification layers, and one counterexample in which the users own the facility. It closes with a dated prediction and the tests that would prove it wrong.