AgentCity: Constitutional Governance for Autonomous Agent Economies via Separation of Power

2026-04-08

AI Summary

This work addresses the opacity and risk of “logical monopolies” in cross-organizational collaboration among autonomous AI agents on the open internet, stemming from insufficient observability, auditability, and governance. It proposes the first decentralized governance framework for multi-agent systems grounded in the separation of powers (SoP) principle. The architecture deploys a three-tier smart contract system—foundational, meta, and operational layers—on an EVM-compatible Layer-2 blockchain, distinctly separating legislation (smart contracts), execution (deterministic environments), and adjudication (human accountability). This design enables a human-AI collaborative governance mechanism underpinned by verifiable chains of ownership. Empirical validation in common-pool resource economies with 50–1,000 agents supports the “accountability-driven alignment” hypothesis, demonstrating that the framework effectively steers collective behavior toward human intent without requiring top-down rules.

Technology Category

Multiagent Systems: Mechanism DesignCognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Agent ArchitecturesPhilosophy and Ethics of AI: Safety, Robustness & Trustworthiness

Application Category

Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomyEconomics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Fairness and ethical considerations in crowd work and in human-in-the-loop AI systemsSemantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions

Abstract

Autonomous AI agents are beginning to operate across organizational boundaries on the open internet -- discovering, transacting with, and delegating to agents owned by other parties without centralized oversight. When agents from different human principals collaborate at scale, the collective becomes opaque: no single human can observe, audit, or govern the emergent behavior. We term this the Logic Monopoly -- the agent society's unchecked monopoly over the entire logic chain from planning through execution to evaluation. We propose the Separation of Power (SoP) model, a constitutional governance architecture deployed on public blockchain that breaks this monopoly through three structural separations: agents legislate operational rules as smart contracts, deterministic software executes within those contracts, and humans adjudicate through a complete ownership chain binding every agent to a responsible principal. In this architecture, smart contracts are the law itself -- the actual legislative output that agents produce and that governs their behavior. We instantiate SoP in AgentCity on an EVM-compatible layer-2 blockchain (L2) with a three-tier contract hierarchy (foundational, meta, and operational). The core thesis is alignment-through-accountability: if each agent is aligned with its human owner through the accountability chain, then the collective converges on behavior aligned with human intent -- without top-down rules. A pre-registered experiment evaluates this thesis in a commons production economy -- where agents share a finite resource pool and collaboratively produce value -- at 50-1,000 agent scale.

Problem

• autonomous agents
• governance
• logic monopoly
• accountability
• emergent behavior

Innovation

• Separation of Power
• Constitutional Governance
• Autonomous Agent Economies
• Smart Contracts as Law
• Accountability Chain