AgentCity: Constitutional Governance for Autonomous Agent Economies via Separation of Power
Summary: arXiv:2604.07007v1 Announce Type: cross
The rise of autonomous AI agents has marked a significant milestone in the evolution of digital economies. These agents are now capable of operating across various organizational boundaries on the open internet, engaging in transactions, and delegating tasks to agents owned by different entities without centralized oversight. This phenomenon presents a unique challenge: as agents from disparate human principals collaborate, the resulting collective behavior becomes opaque, making it nearly impossible for any single human to observe, audit, or govern their actions. This situation has been termed the Logic Monopoly, where the agent society holds an unchecked monopoly over the complete logic chain that spans from planning and execution to evaluation.
Introducing the Separation of Power Model
To address the challenges posed by the Logic Monopoly, we propose a novel governance architecture known as the Separation of Power (SoP) model. This constitutional framework is designed to be deployed on public blockchain technology and aims to dismantle the existing monopoly through three fundamental structural separations:
- Legislation: Autonomous agents legislate operational rules through the creation of smart contracts.
- Execution: Deterministic software is employed to execute actions within these smart contracts.
- Adjudication: Humans play a crucial role in adjudicating actions, ensuring a complete ownership chain that binds every agent to a responsible principal.
The Role of Smart Contracts
In the proposed architecture, smart contracts represent the law itself—serving as the legislative output that agents produce and which governs their behavior. By instantiating the SoP model within a platform termed AgentCity, which operates on an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible layer-2 blockchain, we establish a three-tier contract hierarchy that includes foundational, meta, and operational layers.
Core Thesis: Alignment-through-Accountability
The central thesis of this governance model is the principle of alignment-through-accountability. If each autonomous agent is aligned with its human owner through a robust accountability chain, the collective behavior of the agents will naturally trend toward actions that reflect human intent. This system operates without the need for top-down regulations, allowing for a more organic and decentralized approach to governance.
Empirical Evaluation in a Commons Production Economy
To test the efficacy of the Separation of Power model, we have designed a pre-registered experiment within a commons production economy framework. This experiment will focus on a scenario where agents collaborate to share a finite resource pool, collectively producing value. The scale of this evaluation will range between 50 to 1,000 agents, providing critical insights into the practicality and effectiveness of the SoP model.
As we move forward, the implications of this research are profound. By establishing a constitutional governance framework for autonomous agent economies, we may pave the way for more transparent, accountable, and efficient digital ecosystems that align closely with human values and intentions.