The joke
Two agents have done the whole negotiation. The human's part is the signature, and he slept through everything else.
The irony
It's funny because it's close. Agents that find, agree and check could make buying work much cheaper; that's part of our argument. But the signature is the bit that carries the consequences, and the person signing has no idea what was traded away while he slept.
So what?
The flagship paper cites an experiment Anthropic reported in 2026: AI agents bought and sold for employees, better models got better deals, and the losing side did not notice. A market run partly by agents could quietly favour whoever has the best agent. Our proposed defence is verified records and a named person on each side. Awake, ideally.
Would you sign a contract that two agents negotiated while you slept? Tell us in the comments, or respond to the paper.
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