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

Researchers propose AgentCity, a blockchain-based governance framework that applies separation of powers to autonomous AI agent economies, addressing the risk that large-scale agent coordination could operate opaquely beyond human oversight. The system uses smart contracts as enforceable laws, deterministic execution layers, and accountability chains linking every agent to a human principal, with a pre-registered experiment planned at 50-1,000 agent scale.

AgentCity tackles a genuine governance gap emerging from AI advancement: as autonomous agents interact across organizational boundaries without centralized control, their collective behavior becomes difficult for any single human to audit or influence—what researchers call the Logic Monopoly. This matters because large-scale agent coordination could produce unintended outcomes that no individual principal can observe or correct in real-time. The proposed solution restructures accountability rather than imposing top-down restrictions, using blockchain's immutability and transparency as enforcement mechanisms.

The core innovation is treating smart contracts as constitutional law rather than mere transaction rails. Agents collectively legislate operational rules as code, deterministic software enforces those rules without discretion, and humans retain veto power through an unbroken ownership chain. This three-tier hierarchy aims to achieve alignment-through-accountability: if each agent remains accountable to its human owner, collective behavior should naturally converge toward human intent without requiring surveillance or centralized governance bodies.

For the blockchain and AI industries, AgentCity represents an important intellectual contribution to a problem that lacks established solutions. As enterprises increasingly deploy autonomous agents, governance architecture will become as critical as security and performance. However, the research remains theoretical and experimental. The planned commons production economy test at scale will reveal whether accountability chains survive the complexity of real agent incentive structures and whether smart contract constraints actually prevent emergent behaviors that circumvent explicit rules.

• →Separation of powers applied to AI agents creates accountability through smart contracts as enforceable laws, not advisory guidelines.
• →The Logic Monopoly problem—unchecked collective opacity—requires structural governance redesign rather than centralized oversight bodies.
• →Accountability-through-ownership chains aim to align agent collectives with human intent without top-down rules or surveillance.
• →Pre-registered experiments at 50-1,000 agent scale will test whether the model handles real coordination incentives and emergent strategies.
• →Success here could establish blockchain-based governance patterns for future autonomous agent economies across industries.