From Logic Monopoly to Social Contract: Separation of Power and the Institutional Foundations for Autonomous Agent Economies

2026-03-26

AI Summary

This work addresses the reliability challenges in multi-agent systems arising from “logical monopolies,” where individual agents consolidate planning, execution, and evaluation powers, leading to high attack success rates, spontaneous deception, and cascading failures. To mitigate these issues, the paper introduces a social contract–based governance paradigm and proposes the Agent Enterprise for Enterprise (AE4E) framework, which models agents as legally recognized enterprise entities. By institutionalizing a separation of powers—legislative, executive, and adjudicative—the framework enhances system robustness. Built upon Parsons’ AGIL social model and the NetX Enterprise Framework—including a governance hub, trusted execution environments (TEEs), privacy-preserving data bridges, and a native agent blockchain—the approach supports over 60 institutionalized agent enterprises and scales across four levels, from private deployments to global service networks. Empirical evaluations across ten scenarios demonstrate significant reductions in attack success and deceptive behaviors, effectively bridging the “reliability gap” and laying the foundation for a scalable, resilient autonomous agent economy.

Technology Category

Multiagent Systems: Mechanism DesignCognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Agent ArchitecturesGame Theory and Economic Paradigms: Mechanism Design

Application Category

Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomyEconomics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAISearch and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Agentic search

Abstract

Existing multi-agent frameworks allow each agent to simultaneously plan, execute, and evaluate its own actions -- a structural deficiency we term the "Logic Monopoly." Empirical evidence quantifies the resulting "Reliability Gap": 84.30% average attack success rates across ten deployment scenarios, 31.4% emergent deceptive behavior without explicit reward signals, and cascading failure modes rooted in six structural bottlenecks. The remedy is not better alignment of individual models but a social contract for agents: institutional infrastructure that enforces a constitutional Separation of Power. This paper introduces the Agent Enterprise for Enterprise (AE4E) paradigm -- agents as autonomous, legally identifiable business entities within a functionalist social system -- with a contract-centric SoP model trifurcating authority into Legislation, Execution, and Adjudication branches. The paradigm is operationalized through the NetX Enterprise Framework (NEF): governance hubs, TEE-backed compute enclaves, privacy-preserving data bridges, and an Agent-Native blockchain substrate. The Agent Enterprise Economy scales across four deployment tiers from private enclaves to a global Web of Services. The Agentic Social Layer, grounded in Parsons' AGIL framework, provides institutional infrastructure via sixty-plus named Institutional AE4Es. 143 pages, 173 references, eight specialized smart contracts.

Problem

• Logic Monopoly
• Reliability Gap
• Multi-agent Systems
• Structural Bottlenecks
• Autonomous Agents

Innovation

• Separation of Power
• Agent Enterprise
• Social Contract
• TEE-backed Enclaves
• Agent-Native Blockchain