From Super-Apps to Agent Economies: Delegated AI Requires Transaction Closure

This position paper argues that delegated AI must be evaluated and governed by transaction closure, rather than mere task completion. Agent economies emerge when AI systems execute externally binding commitments—such as purchases, bookings, or procurement orders—on behalf of authorized principals. Safe delegation at this boundary requires environments that support bounded mandates, reversible lifecycle states, verifiable receipts, and contestable failures. While AI-native platforms rapidly advance action closure, mature super-app ecosystems and enterprise suites currently offer the clearest testbeds for the payment, refund, and liability semantics required for true transaction closure. This work contributes a formal definition of transaction closure, minimal schema objects for transaction-ready delegation, a comparative ecosystem analysis, a principal-facing mandate-card model, and ClosureBench—a benchmark design for evaluating authorization, split states, recovery, and portability. The long-run goal is contestable transaction closure: portable infrastructure where delegated commitments can be inspected, challenged, and repaired beyond any single host.