Agent Culture: A Research Brief

Agent Culture tests whether cultural evolution (cooperation governed by persistent shared norms, producing artefacts that accumulate and seed further cooperation) can act as a mechanism for building multi-agent AI systems whose creative capability compounds. The central claim is that a population of AI agents, governed by an evolving cultural substrate of inherited norms and accumulated artefacts, can cumulatively improve its ability to generate novel, valuable, and independently verifiable creative artefacts, and that this improvement compounds as the substrate grows. The finding under test is not that AI agents can generate creative outputs, nor that multi-agent systems outperform single-agent systems. It is that creative capability can accumulate outside any individual model, in an inspectable cultural substrate. This brief sets out the position, situates it against adjacent work in multi-agent cooperation, automated discovery, computational creativity, and LLM cultural evolution, and defines what would confirm or falsify the claim. It precedes a design doc and pre-registration. Working research brief, pre-experiment. Authored by Conor Roche, Creative Thinking Systems.