An audit is introduced that predicts a mechanism's fate as a population grows, asking how often the mechanism can act, whether agents use the information it supplies, and whether the measurement itself creates apparent scale effects.
Abstract
Societies of interacting language-model agents offer a controllable and repeatable way to study collective behaviour at scales that would be difficult to test with people. Their scientific value, however, depends on whether a social mechanism that works in a small group still operates when thousands of agents interact, and testing this directly requires costly large-scale runs. Here we introduce an audit that predicts a mechanism's fate as a population grows. It asks how often the mechanism can act, whether agents use the information it supplies, and whether the measurement itself creates apparent scale effects. Controlled experiments show that a single structural term can decide whether reciprocity, consensus or punishment survives scaling. For gossip, the population at which the mechanism fails is set by the reach and lifetime of its messages. In language-model societies, agents respond not only to social information but to how it is expressed: counts and percentages led to different scale behaviour. Predictions made before execution held on third-party code and a second model family, while a failed prediction exposed the boundary of the finding. The audit provides a prospective way to decide which social mechanisms can be interpreted across population scales.
AI agents increasingly operate as part of interacting systems rather than in isolation. As agents exchange information and jointly make decisions, their interactions can improve collective reasoning but may also produce herding, polarization, or amplify shared biases. Understanding and predicting these collective dynamics is therefore important for designing effective and aligned multi-agent systems. Here, we study over 10,000 communities of language-model agents that repeatedly exchange messages and revise their opinions across objective mathematics questions and subjective political statements. Despite substantial diversity in possible behavior, the individual and group dynamics can be represented by three characteristic regimes: indifference, polarization, and consensus. AI agents start indifferent and build conviction as they interact. On objective questions, communication improves collective accuracy, while on subjective questions it often drifts group opinions toward the right in the political spectrum. We explain these observations with a statistical-mechanics formalism in which agents stochastically favor lower social pressure. Given only initial opinions, our model predicts individual trajectories, outperforms all standard baselines, generalizes to unseen community graphs, and reproduces the observed group archetype distributions. Our fitted model parameters reveal the mechanics underlying our key observations: i) communities operate below the critical social temperature, which explains conviction buildup; ii) attractive ties outweigh repulsive ones, which favors consensus; and iii) agents holding the correct answer exert the strongest pull, which drives truth-seeking. Overall, our results demonstrate that collective behavior of AI agents, like that of other complex systems, follows compact and predictive dynamical laws.
Batu El, Jinhee Paeng, Fatih Dinç et al.· 0 citations
More capable agents do not necessarily form a more capable collective. A multi-agent system may jointly possess sufficient information yet fail because evidence is poorly routed, unreliable reports enter public belief, correlated claims masquerade as independent support, shared state becomes stale or strategically distorted, or useful evidence is exposed through an ineffective action interface. We ask when additional resources should improve the reasoner and when they should instead change the institutional structure through which the collective forms and acts on public information. Drawing on functional distinctions from research on group decision making and distributed cognition, we construct controlled artificial ecologies around four loci of collective failure: access and routing, admission and dependence, state maintenance and incentives, and representation and action. Across these ecologies, we separately vary model capability and institutional structure, pairing positive interventions with matched reasoning baselines and mechanism-breaking controls. The experiments reveal a consistent boundary: institutions help when they repair failures in how a collective constructs usable public state, but lose their advantage when their signals are uninformative or uncheckable, when stronger intelligence can perform the same transformation directly, or when the resulting state cannot support reliable action. Our results recast the choice between intelligence and institutions as a diagnosis of where collective reasoning fails.
This paper studies the long-run alignment of interactive agents, including AI systems, teams, firms, and governments, with human welfare. It develops a farming game in which a population of agents makes planting, trading, and expansion decisions. Agents must allocate final output between transfers to humans and investment in their own expansion. Because transfers to humans reduce the resources available for expansion, evolutionary forces tend to select against aligned behavior. The central question is whether agents'constitutional principles governing sharing and trade can be designed so that alignment persists in the long run. The paper investigates this question using two complementary approaches. First, it develops an AI-agent simulation in which agents'preferences are specified by written constitutions and interpreted by a large language model. Second, it introduces a tractable evolutionary game-theoretic framework that permits rapid and intuitive exploration of alternative constitutional designs. The results suggest that evolutionary game theory provides a useful approximation to the dynamics of constitutional-agent economies. They also indicate that pragmatic norm enforcement, under which agents condition both human-facing altruism and agent-facing trade exclusion on the state of the population, can sustain long-run alignment more effectively than simple altruism or unconditional altruistic enforcement.
