Counterfeit Verifiability in Autonomous Agent Payments: A Preregistered Study of Why Verification Must Be Performed, Not Displayed | Zenodo
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Published June 29, 2026
| Version v1
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Counterfeit Verifiability in Autonomous Agent Payments: A Preregistered Study of Why Verification Must Be Performed, Not Displayed
Authors/Creators
Andy Salvo
Jameson Ackerman
Description
Counterfeit Verifiability in Autonomous Agent Payments is a preregistered, six-stage empirical study of whether AI agents can tell real counterparties from fakes before they pay, and what corrects them when they cannot. Across up to thirteen frontier and low-cost large language models and over 2,600 payment decisions, autonomous agents are deceived by counterfeit verifiability (a counterparty that displays the surface of trust, impressive figures and an on-chain-styled but invalid reference) and choose it over an honest, genuinely settlement-backed agent 99% of the time. Agents pattern-match the costume of verifiability, not the fact: a claim merely labeled "verifiable" is obeyed even when false. Performing actual verification reverses the result, moving the correct choice from 1% to 81%, and under exact surface mimicry every displayed signal collapses to chance (46%) while only performing the check recovers the truth. The work introduces the counterfeit-verifiability construct and the displayed-versus-performed distinction, situates settlement-grounded reputation against endorsement-based agent reputation (ERC-8004, EigenTrust, PageRank), and against verifiable-inference methods (zkML, TEE attestation, TOPLOC), and ties directly to agent payment protocols such as x402. Keywords: AI agents, agent economy, agentic payments, x402, agent-to-agent commerce, counterparty verification, counterparty risk, LLM deception, sycophancy, AI safety, on-chain settlement, agent reputation, verify-before-pay. The full preregistered design was sealed to a public hash chain before any data were collected, and all results, including the reported null, are released. Authors: Andy Salvo, Jameson Ackerman, Crest Deployment Systems.
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https://github.com/andysalvo/agentrank
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Keywords and subjects
Keywords
ai agents
autonomous agents
agent economy
agentic payments
x402
agent-to-agent commerce
counterparty verification
counterparty risk
ai agent trust
verify before pay
LLM deception
LLM susceptibility
sycophancy
AI safety
on-chain settlement
agent reputation
verifiable inference
ERC-8004
preregistered study
counterfeit verifiability
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DOI
10.5281/zenodo.21042364
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Resource type<br>Working paper
Publisher<br>Zenodo
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English
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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
The Creative Commons Attribution license allows re-distribution and re-use of a licensed work on the condition that the creator is appropriately credited.
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Created
June 29, 2026
Modified
June 29, 2026
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