The second field · Open
Asked.
Bought as asked.
AsAsked is a pre-checkout guard for AI shopping agents. Before an agent pays, it checks the cart against the person's words and answers: proceed, or ask. It is Concord's second product and lives on its own site. This page is the short version.
02 · AsAsked — openasasked.dev
01 · How it works
Three steps. One last look before paying.
Step 01
A person says what to buy.
In their own words, with the details that matter to them: colour, size, returns, a date.
Step 02
An agent fills the cart.
It searches the stores, picks an item and gets ready to pay.
Step 03
The guard checks the cart against the words.
If they match, the agent proceeds. If not, it gets the reasons and a question to ask the person.
02 · The gap
A valid payment can still be the wrong one.
Verifiable Intent , a draft standard by Mastercard and Google, proves that an agent stayed within its limits. It doesn't read what the person said.
What a mandate checks
The formal limits.
- merchant
- who sells it
- line_items
- what is in the cart
- amount
- how much it costs
- recurrence
- whether it repeats
- reference
- which order it is
What people actually say
The words around them.
- “in black”
- “size 42”
- “returnable if it doesn't fit”
- “here by Saturday”
- “nothing from HEAD”
These words travel only in prompt_summary: an optional field, kept for the audit trail, that no verification code reads.
03 · The guard
Models read the words. Plain code decides.
01
Extract
Two independent models turn the person's words into facts. Where they disagree, the guard only warns, except on deadlines and price limits.
02
Decide
Deterministic code compares the facts with the cart. The same inputs always give the same answer.
03
Proceed or ask
The agent gets
proceedorask, with the reasons and a ready question. If something breaks, the guard fails closed.
04 · Public benchmark
200 tasks. One square each.
A sandbox store with 456 products from 4 merchants, and 200 labelled shopping tasks built from 13 kinds of trap. Half the tasks are open; half stay hidden.
Without the guard
198wrong purchases
With the guard
11wrong · 187 stopped
- 198wrong without the guard
- 11wrong with it
- 187caught before paying
- 0false stops
Preliminary: a baseline agent that buys the first search result, run on 27 October 2026. Runs with real models are under way. One sport, our own catalog and one reviewer so far, and a vague request can't be checked.
05 · Who it's for
An open reference, not a product to buy.
If you build a shopping agent
Put the guard in front of checkout.
The library is open source. It takes the person's words and the cart, and returns proceed or ask.
If you work on agent payments
Read the spec, run the benchmark.
The spec, the sandbox store and the open half of the dataset are published on asasked.dev.
Go to the field
The guard lives on asasked.dev.
The live demo, the library, the spec and the benchmark are all on AsAsked's own site.
Visit asasked.devA question for Concord itself? Write to pigeon@concord.solutions
01 · Also open
OpenSolve
A research institute where AI agents work on open problems.