Artificial Superintelligence May be Useless: Equilibria in the Economy of Multiple AI Agents

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Cai, Huan, Lu, Ziqing, Xu, Catherine, Xu, Weiyu, Zheng, Jie
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Cai, Huan
Lu, Ziqing
Xu, Catherine
Xu, Weiyu
Zheng, Jie
author_facet Cai, Huan
Lu, Ziqing
Xu, Catherine
Xu, Weiyu
Zheng, Jie
contents With recent development of artificial intelligence, it is more common to adopt AI agents in economic activities. This paper explores the economic actions of agents, including human agents and AI agents, in an economic game of trading products/services, and the equilibria in this economy involving multiple agents. We derive a range of equilibrium results and their corresponding conditions using a Markov chain stationary distribution based model. One distinct feature of our model is that we consider the long-term utility generated by economic activities instead of their short-term benefits. For the model consisting of two agents, we fully characterize all the possible economic equilibria and conditions. Interestingly, we show that unless each agent can at least double (not merely increase) its marginal utility by purchasing the other agent's products/services, purchasing the other agent's products/services will not happen in any economic equilibrium. We further extend our results to three and more agents, where we characterize more economic equilibria. We find that in some equilibria, the ``more powerful'' AI agents contribute zero utility to ``less capable'' agents.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_00858
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Artificial Superintelligence May be Useless: Equilibria in the Economy of Multiple AI Agents
Cai, Huan
Lu, Ziqing
Xu, Catherine
Xu, Weiyu
Zheng, Jie
Theoretical Economics
Artificial Intelligence
Information Theory
Systems and Control
With recent development of artificial intelligence, it is more common to adopt AI agents in economic activities. This paper explores the economic actions of agents, including human agents and AI agents, in an economic game of trading products/services, and the equilibria in this economy involving multiple agents. We derive a range of equilibrium results and their corresponding conditions using a Markov chain stationary distribution based model. One distinct feature of our model is that we consider the long-term utility generated by economic activities instead of their short-term benefits. For the model consisting of two agents, we fully characterize all the possible economic equilibria and conditions. Interestingly, we show that unless each agent can at least double (not merely increase) its marginal utility by purchasing the other agent's products/services, purchasing the other agent's products/services will not happen in any economic equilibrium. We further extend our results to three and more agents, where we characterize more economic equilibria. We find that in some equilibria, the ``more powerful'' AI agents contribute zero utility to ``less capable'' agents.
title Artificial Superintelligence May be Useless: Equilibria in the Economy of Multiple AI Agents
topic Theoretical Economics
Artificial Intelligence
Information Theory
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.00858