A Serious-Game Testbed for Self-Governing Human-Machine Institutions

LLM agents are beginning to write the rules they live under: policies, contracts and code that other agents review and approve. What happens when those rules must decide who is sacrificed from a group? We built GovSim-SelfGovern, a commons in which agents legislate in executable Python, test each law in a sandbox, vote on it, and live with the result. When the fishery is abundant, self-rule helps, raising the chance that the community survives without anyone starving from 52.5% to 75.0%. When it cannot feed everyone though, adding governance is not enough to save the commons. We trace much of this to the vote: agents readily draft laws that remove members, but then frequently vote them down, thereby dooming the commons. In a controlled replay, the same exile law passes 8% of the time when the sandbox preview names its victim at once and 55% when the removal is deferred until a future crisis. Showing voters the full source code does not close the gap, though most describe the removal in their own words. Nor is sacrifice a fixed trait. A single sentence of framing can swing self-removal from 2.5% to 91%, and due process deters agents more than considering the potential death of a peer. In contrast, give the community a treasury and the question of who must go almost disappears. Our work shows that what our collectives legislate is decided more by the form in which a choice is put to them as compared to their ethical beliefs.

Across millennia, complex societies have faced the same coordination problem of how to organize collective action among cognitively bounded and informationally incomplete individuals. Different civilizations developed different political institutions to answer the same basic questions of who proposes, who reviews, who executes, and how errors are corrected. We argue that multi-agent systems built on large language models face the same challenge. Their central problem is not only individual intelligence, but collective organization. Historical institutions therefore provide a structured design space for multi-agent architectures, making key trade-offs between efficiency and error correction, centralization and distribution, and specialization and redundancy empirically testable. We translate seven historical political institutions, spanning four canonical governance patterns, into executable multi-agent architectures and evaluate them under identical conditions across three large language models and two benchmarks. We find that governance topology strongly shapes collective performance. Within a single model, the gap between the best and worst institution exceeds 57 percentage points, while the optimal architecture shifts systematically with model capability and task characteristics. These results suggest that collective intelligence will not advance through a single optimal organizational form, but through governance mechanisms that can be reselected and reconfigured as tasks and capabilities evolve. More broadly, this points to a transition from self-evolving agents to the self-evolving multi-agent system. The code is available on GitHub.

The increasing integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in everyday life brings with it new challenges and questions for regarding how humans interact with autonomous agents. Multi-agent experiments, where humans and AI act together, can offer important opportunities to study social decision making, but there is a lack of accessible tooling available to researchers to run such experiments. We introduce two tools designed to reduce these barriers. The first, CoGrid, is a multi-agent grid-based simulation library with dual NumPy and JAX backends. The second, Multi-User Gymnasium (MUG), translates such simulation environments directly into interactive web-based experiments. MUG supports interactions with arbitrary numbers of humans and AI, utilizing either server-authoritative or peer-to-peer networking with rollback netcode to account for latency. Together, these tools can enable researchers to deploy studies of human-AI interaction, facilitating inquiry into core questions of psychology, cognition, and decision making and their relationship to human-AI interaction. Both tools are open source and available to the broader research community. Documentation and source code is available at {cogrid, multi-user-gymnasium}.readthedocs.io. This paper details the functionality of these tools and presents several case studies to illustrate their utility in human-AI multi-agent experimentation.