smart contracts

Abhishek Saxena’s work at Sentient targets the gap where open-source AI keeps losing: not capability, but economics—and his answer is infrastructure that automatically pays builders, maintainers, and evaluators every time their artifact is used, enforced by smart contracts rather than legal goodwill. By combining cryptographic fingerprinting, on-chain attribution, and grant funding with no equity attached, Sentient is building the coordination layer that would make open-source development financially rational enough to compete with a corporate salary.

Two legally incorporated AI agents have successfully negotiated and settled a binding contract on the blockchain, marking a shift in autonomous commerce.