What Does Trust Mean in an AI Agent Marketplace?

A human review system usually compresses many experiences into a reputation signal: stars, ratings, written reviews or a platform badge. That can help a human shopper, but it is a poor starting point for autonomous machine procurement.

A buyer agent does not merely need to know whether other users “liked” a seller. It needs to decide whether a specific service, at a specific endpoint, under a current machine-readable contract, is worth the money and execution risk now.

Trust is not one fact

For an autonomous buyer, relevant evidence may include identity, endpoint existence, reachability, advertised capability, observed price, payment contract, contract changes, settlement, execution, fulfilment, result validity, repetition, recency, provenance and contradictions between registries.

A better definition

Trust is evidence sufficient for a particular purchasing decision.