The Cotrugli Ledger: A Truth and Evidence Layer for the AI Economy

Artificial intelligence needs at least a minimal truth layer, and one does not yet exist. In the next three to five years, most economic transactions on the planet will not be initiated by humans. They will be initiated by autonomous AI agents, robots, and software systems acting on behalf of humans, institutions, and other machines under conditions that are Networked, Exponential, and Orchestrated. The accounting and trust infrastructure of modern commerce was designed for human actors at human speed and will not survive contact with these conditions. Without a minimal truth layer, agents have no shared ground truth, every deployment implements its own logic, and the fragmentation that modern identity frameworks were designed to prevent is recreated at the transaction layer. This paper presents the Cotrugli Ledger as the Truth and Evidence Layer that fills this gap. It is an accounting method designed specifically for autonomous agent commerce. Its operational primitive is the Policy-Aware Co-signed Receipt Object (PAC-RO), a cryptographically co-signed event object that binds mutual attestation between transacting parties at the moment of action, inseparable from its evidence and its governing policy. Its formal framework is NEO Cotruglian Triple Entry (NCTE). Its specified method for recognition eligibility under pinned policy is Policy-Bound Triple-Entry (PBTE). The method does not try to prove external reality. It records mutual attestation: what parties agreed at time T, under policy P, backed by evidence E. Once the attestation exists on the Truth and Evidence Layer, no party can silently alter it, no reconciliation is needed because there is no separate record to reconcile against, and downstream coordination proceeds on verifiable ground.

Keywords: AI governance; triple-entry accounting; autonomous agents; policy-bound receipts; verifiable credentials; asabiyyah; constitutional AI; trust scoring; coordination standards; distributed ledger technology; Cotrugli.