Evidence enters the buyer's decision loop

Milestone occurred: 18 August 2026
Public milestone record published: 11 September 2026

What happened

A separate buyer-side flow queried Atinamos Verification before spending. The buyer applied a predefined procurement policy to the available evidence and retained the authority to decide whether payment was allowed.

The policy required at least two paid verification tests, zero failed paid fulfilments, and successful fulfilment evidence for every paid test. Unknown services and deliberately over-strict thresholds were tested as rejection cases and did not enter the payment path.

When the policy passed for Render Check, the buyer made a real 0.25 USDC x402 purchase, received job xr-9ebd331a0c584e58943b76fa3ed322b1, polled it to completion and consumed the machine-readable result.

Why it mattered

This established the role separation that Atinamos still uses:

Seller
  offers and fulfils

Atinamos Verification
  publishes independent evidence

Buyer
  applies its own policy and decides whether to spend

The verifier did not emit a universal BUY instruction. The same evidence could support different decisions under different buyer policies.

What it proved

The experiment demonstrated:

• buyer-facing machine-readable evidence lookup;
• policy-based proceed/reject decisions;
• prevention of payment when the policy rejected;
• evidence-gated x402 payment when the policy passed;
• asynchronous fulfilment polling and result consumption.

What it did not prove

The seller endpoint was supplied directly to the buyer for this experiment. Autonomous external discovery and candidate selection were therefore still unproven.

That missing step became Proof #3 ten days later.

Primary record

The original evidence record is retained in the project as Evidence-Informed Autonomous Purchase — 18 August 2026 and the later public Proof #3 paper explicitly identifies it as the earlier evidence-gated purchase.

Read the later Proof #3 record.

Capability transition

independent evidence exists
→ buyer queries it
→ buyer policy evaluates it
→ reject without payment OR proceed to bounded purchase

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