AgentCity: Constitutional Governance for Autonomous Agent Economies via Separation of Power
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arXiv
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| Natura: | Preprint |
| Pubblicazione: |
2026
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| _version_ | 1866915923893420032 |
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| author | Ruan, Anbang Zhang, Xing |
| author_facet | Ruan, Anbang Zhang, Xing |
| contents | 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. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_07007 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | AgentCity: Constitutional Governance for Autonomous Agent Economies via Separation of Power Ruan, Anbang Zhang, Xing Multiagent Systems Artificial Intelligence Computers and Society 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. |
| title | AgentCity: Constitutional Governance for Autonomous Agent Economies via Separation of Power |
| topic | Multiagent Systems Artificial Intelligence Computers and Society |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.07007 |