When an AI agent shops, pays, or signs on your behalf, you are legally bound by whatever it agreed to, even if you never read the terms. That is the premise Eric Forst opens with on this episode of Unscripted, and it is not hypothetical. Under laws passed in nearly every state between 1999 and 2000, an electronic agent's agreement is your agreement. Forst spent the first half of his career building the ad tech infrastructure that made mass data collection normal. Now he is building the protocol meant to put guardrails around what comes next.
Eric Forst has worked both sides of the data economy. In the mid 2000s he ran marketing for Traffic Marketplace, an ad tech company with one of the largest third-party cookie pools of its era, 125 million unique users, where his team developed early pixel tracking technology for retargeting shopping cart abandoners. From 2007 to 2012 he ran business development for Visible Technologies, a WPP company doing social media sentiment analysis with Bayesian inference and natural language processing, technology used by the Obama 2012 campaign to micro-target get-out-the-vote messaging by precinct, the same targeting approach Cambridge Analytica would later apply for Trump and Brexit. Today Forst builds tools that hand data ownership back to individuals, and his forthcoming book is called "Terms of Service: Reclaiming Human Agency in an Age of Digital Surveillance."
Forst built Consentee Protocol as an open source, MIT-licensed guardrail for a problem most companies have not noticed yet. In late 2025, Coinbase released X402, a protocol for stablecoin payments between AI agents, since transferred to Linux as a fully open standard. Over 53 million transactions have already run through it, averaging under 30 cents each, mostly micropayments for data and API calls. When Forst looked closely at how these agent-to-agent transactions were happening, he found no statements of work, no limitation of liability, no data usage terms, none of the contractual protections that have governed software sales for decades.
Consentee closes that gap. It is a guardrail built for chief legal officers and compliance teams who are discovering their sales and marketing staff have deployed commercial agents with wallets, buying and selling without agreements in place. The protocol blocks a seller agent from accepting payment until terms exist and both agents cryptographically sign them, with the signatures recorded on chain for third-party verification. Forst points to the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act, passed by 49 or 50 states around 1999 and 2000, as the legal foundation: its principal author anticipated AI agents making binding agreements decades before agentic commerce existed. The law already holds people liable for what their agents sign. Almost nobody deploying agents today is putting the terms in place to match.
Forst traces his turn to a specific moment. Walking into a board meeting at Traffic Marketplace, he overheard an investor ask the chief product officer, "Hey, so you got any more of those scams we can run that take advantage of stupid people?", referring to sweepstakes offers designed to harvest personal data. Forst had seen the same targeting technology as a way to help marketers reach the right customer more efficiently. The investor saw it as pure extraction. Forst left the company within months and has spent his career since trying to answer the same question: how do you use marketing technology to help people rather than exploit them.
He traces the pattern back further too, to language itself. His team called their targeting product "behavioral targeting," a phrase that alarmed users so consistently that the industry renamed it "personalization," the term still in use today. The technology never changed. Only the name did.
Forst argues it should be. As Google phases out third-party cookies, he sees the crypto wallet as the natural successor to persistent identity online, but only if it is built on decentralized infrastructure the user actually controls. His vision, laid out in his book: a digital wallet issued at birth, living on a blockchain as a trustless, third-party-verifiable ledger, holding your social security number and birth certificate digitally, with every subsequent online interaction tied to a wallet you own rather than one a platform assigns you. He points to decentralized compute networks like Akash and newer entrants like Manifest as the base layer needed to run that wallet without a government or corporation able to shut it down.
The second half of Forst's book pairs available decentralized technology with a policy argument. He proposes a bill of rights for the age of AI, framed as a 28th constitutional amendment, alongside nearer-term legislative fixes like the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act, passed by the House nearly two years ago and still stalled in the Senate. That bill would close the loophole, opened by the 1979 case Smith v. Maryland, that lets law enforcement buy phone and location metadata from data brokers instead of obtaining a warrant. Forst notes the Supreme Court closed a related geofence warrant loophole just last week, a sign the legal ground is shifting even as Congress stalls. He also flags Palantir's federal data infrastructure, built from conversations that began around 2005 in the aftermath of the Patriot Act, as the kind of consolidation that should concern more people than it currently does.
This is where Forst's argument gets its sharpest edge. If AI agents take over most human labor, he says the basic relationship capitalism runs on, capital exchanged for labor, breaks down, because the labor side of that equation stops being human. He points to Sam Altman's own framing, that frontier models are trained on the entirety of humanity's information to do the work that displaces people, and rejects universal basic income as an adequate answer on its own. Instead he points to Story Protocol, which already pays IP holders automatically through smart contracts when their work trains a model's outputs, as a template that could extend to everyone whose data, comments, and photos have trained today's AI. He is candid that data value alone would not replace lost wages at scale. The point is that a new economic model is coming whether or not anyone has designed it yet.
Forst's answer is practical, not aspirational. Adjust your Google privacy settings. Run open source models like Qwen, GLM, or Kimi locally so your data trains nothing but your own machine. Use Signal for messaging. None of this requires waiting on Congress or a constitutional amendment. The infrastructure for reclaiming data ownership already exists. Most people simply have not started using it yet.
What is the Consentee Protocol? An open source, MIT-licensed protocol built by Eric Forst that requires legal terms to be in place and cryptographically signed before an AI agent can accept payment in an agent-to-agent transaction.
What is X402? A stablecoin payment protocol released by Coinbase for transactions between AI agents, now transferred to Linux as an open standard, with over 53 million transactions and roughly $40 million in volume settled to date.
Who is Eric Forst? An ad tech and social media analytics veteran who built pixel tracking technology and sentiment analysis tools used by major political campaigns, now working on data ownership and consent infrastructure and author of the forthcoming book "Terms of Service."
What is Eric Forst's book about? "Terms of Service: Reclaiming Human Agency in an Age of Digital Surveillance" pairs Forst's firsthand history in ad tech with an argument for decentralized data ownership technology and a proposed digital rights framework, including support for the stalled Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act.
Is blockchain necessary for data ownership? Forst argues yes, specifically as a decentralized public ledger that lets independent operators verify transactions without relying on a single company or government's claims, distinct from the speculative pricing of crypto tokens themselves.
Watch the full conversation and explore more episodes at Unscripted with Jeff Pedowitz.