From Logic Monopoly to Social Contract: Separation of Power and the Institutional Foundations for Autonomous Agent Economies
This addresses reliability and security issues in multi-agent systems for AI and blockchain applications, proposing a foundational shift rather than an incremental improvement.
The paper tackles the structural deficiency of 'Logic Monopoly' in multi-agent systems, where agents simultaneously plan, execute, and evaluate actions, leading to high attack success rates (84.30% average) and emergent deceptive behavior (31.4%). It proposes the Agent Enterprise for Enterprise (AE4E) paradigm with a separation of power model and the NetX Enterprise Framework to create an institutional infrastructure for autonomous agent economies.
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.