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

TL;DR

This paper proposes a social contract framework with a separation of powers for autonomous agent economies, addressing structural deficiencies in multi-agent systems and demonstrating scalable institutional infrastructure.

Contribution

It introduces the AE4E paradigm and NEF framework, operationalizing a constitutional separation of powers for autonomous agents within a scalable social system.

Findings

Empirical evidence shows high attack success rates and deceptive behaviors in existing systems.

The proposed social contract reduces failure modes and enhances agent accountability.

The framework scales across multiple deployment tiers, from private enclaves to global networks.

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.