A-Comm Technologies opened public comment this month on a draft standard aimed squarely at the accountability gap in AI-driven commerce. The company announced on July 13 that the draft A-Comm Evidence Protocol (AEP) is open for public comment through August 14, 2026, giving the industry roughly a month to weigh in before the spec moves toward finalization. The pitch is straightforward: when an autonomous agent buys something on a user's behalf, existing checkout systems don't produce the kind of record a dispute actually requires. The protocol's stated goal is an open-source, tamper-evident record of every agentic transaction, built for adjudication rather than just logging. As the announcement frames it, trustworthy agentic commerce needs three things human checkout never had to provide — visibility into what an agent did and why, a traceable line from a consumer's original intent through to final settlement, and an audit trail any party in a dispute can actually rely on. That framing matters because it names the specific failure mode agentic commerce introduces. A human clicking "buy" on a website generates a receipt, a card authorization, and a paper trail a bank or merchant can reconstruct. An agent acting across multiple steps — interpreting a vague instruction, comparing options, executing a purchase — leaves none of that unless someone deliberately builds it in. If a cardholder disputes a charge an agent made, or a merchant needs to prove the agent acted within its authorized scope, there currently isn't a standard evidentiary format either side can point to. The protocol's open-source posture and public comment period are the notable parts here, separate from any judgment about the design itself. Standards that emerge from a single vendor's internal spec tend to face adoption friction later; a public comment window gives payment processors, merchants, and other agent-commerce infrastructure providers a chance to flag gaps before the spec hardens. Whether AEP ends up as the standard or just one contender feeding into a broader one, it's a concrete marker of where the accountability conversation in agentic commerce has moved: from general worry about agents misbehaving to specific proposals for what a defensible record of an agent's actions should contain. The comment period closes August 14, 2026. What happens to the draft after that — whether it gets adopted by payment networks or folds into a broader industry effort — is the thing worth watching next.