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

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.25100v1
• Date: Thu, 26 Mar 2026 07:14:48 GMT
• Title: From Logic Monopoly to Social Contract: Separation of Power and the Institutional Foundations for Autonomous Agent Economies
• Abstract summary: Existing multi-agent frameworks allow each agent to simultaneously plan, execute, and evaluate its own actions.<n>The remedy is not better alignment of individual models but a social contract for agents: institutional infrastructure that enforces a constitutional Separation of Power.<n>This paper introduces the Agent Enterprise for Enterprise paradigm -- agents as autonomous, legally identifiable business entities within a functionalist social system.
• Score: 0.2900810893770133
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• 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.

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