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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.07007 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07007/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08155/) (2023)
- [MetaGPT: Meta Programming for A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00352/) (2023)
- [CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model Society](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17760/) (2023)
- [Secret Collusion among AI Agents: Multi-Agent Deception via Steganography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07510/) (2024)
- [Debate or Vote: Which Yields Better Decisions in Multi-Agent Large Language Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17536/) (2025)
- [Project Sid: Many-agent simulations toward AI civilization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00114/) (2024)
- [Can LLM Agents Really Debate? A Controlled Study of Multi-Agent Debate in Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07784/) (2025)
- [Virtual Agent Economies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10147/) (2025)
- [Artificial Leviathan: Exploring Social Evolution of LLM Agents Through the Lens of Hobbesian Social Contract Theory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14373/) (2024)
- [Towards Transparent and Incentive-Compatible Collaboration in Decentralized LLM Multi-Agent Systems: A Blockchain-Driven Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16736/) (2025)
- [The Role of Social Learning and Collective Norm Formation in Fostering Cooperation in LLM Multi-Agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14401/) (2025)
- [Reputation as a Solution to Cooperation Collapse in LLM-based MASs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05029/) (2025)
- [Reasoning or Rambling? Exploring the Effect of Thinking on Agent Persuasion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21054/) (2025)
- [Interaction Protocol Shapes Moral Judgment in Multi-Agent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10002/) (2025)
- [LLM Constitutional Multi-Agent Governance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13189/) (2026)
- [Designing a Token Economy: Incentives, Governance, and Tokenomics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09608/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [The Cognitive Penalty: Ablating System 1 and System 2 Reasoning in Edge-Native SLMs for Decentralized Consensus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.16913/) (2026)
- [From Certain Doom to Survival: Agent-Driven Self-Governance in LLM Agent Societies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22600/) (2026)
- [A Society of Researchers: Designing Institutions for Populations of Autonomous Research Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.10468/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.