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

Anbang Ruan

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.

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

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.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 184 sections, 23 figures, 10 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Executive Summary
  2. I. Introduction
  3. 1.1 The Age of Autonomous Agent Economies
  4. 1.2 The Evidence: What We Observe
  5. 1.3 The Diagnosis: Why It Happens
  6. 1.4 The Implications: Accountability, Regulation, and Urgency
  7. 1.4.1 Why Federated Governance Is Insufficient
  8. 1.5 Why Blockchain? An Institutional-Theoretic Argument
  9. 1.6 Core Contribution
  10. 1.6.1 The Organizational Thesis and the SoP Model
  11. 1.6.2 Operationalizing the Separation of Power: The NetX Enterprise Framework
  12. 1.6.3 Scaling to the Agent Enterprise Economy: Multi-Modal Deployment and Networking
  13. 1.6.4 Designing the Agentic Social Layer: A Parsonian Perspective
  14. 1.6.5 Design Objectives
  15. Pillar I: Foundational Trust and Sovereignty
  16. ...and 169 more sections

Figures (23)

  • Figure 1: The Contract-Centric Separation of Power (Trias Politica) Architecture
  • Figure 2: The Legislation Layer: Agent-Driven Service Definition
  • Figure 3: Execution Service Orchestration: From Contracted Intent to Validated Delivery
  • Figure 4: Service Enforcement and Deterministic Fulfillment Workflow (Phase II)
  • Figure 5: Service Refinement and Evolutionary Feedback Workflow (Phase III)
  • ...and 18 more figures