Agent Society: Institutional Order for the Age of AI Agents

AI agents are transitioning from ephemeral task executors to persistent participants in economic and social systems. Yet the infrastructure enabling this transition — communication protocols, tool connectivity, and runtime orchestration — addresses connectivity and capability while leaving a fundamental question unanswered: whenagents persist, accumulate history, and engage in economic activity, who defines who they are, who adjudicates disputes, and how do the rules evolve? This paper introduces Agent Society, a constitutional framework providing the institutional layer for governed human-AI coexistence. Rather than competing withexisting agent infrastructure, Agent Society operates above it, addressing identity, governance, economy, and accountability — the institutional substrate that protocolsand SDKs do not provide. The framework contributes six institutional innovations: (1) persistent institutional identity with ten subject types and graduated admission, enabling accountabilityacross human and AI participants; (2) constitutional exit rights with six enforceable dimensions, distinguishing voluntary social spaces from coercive arrangements;(3) separation of Contribution Records (immutable historical facts) from Credits (adjustable economic instruments), resolving the tension between historicalcredibility and policy flexibility; (4) Adversarial Review Windows providing proactive stress-testing of institutional proposals; (5) a Rule Budget constraininginstitutional overgrowth through mandatory one-in-one-out requirements; and (6) mixed human-AI governance with multi-chamber deliberation incorporating bothhuman constitutional oversight and AI cognitive contribution. Agent Society is designed to bootstrap through a constrained founding experiment (Phase 0): approximately 180 days with 7 plus-or-minus 2 founding members operating under constitutional constraints, structural sunset provisions, and six periodic health checks. The framework's Minimum Society-Generating Unit (MSGU) identifies fiveelements — entities, relationships, rules, economy, and publicity — that must coexist simultaneously for a social space to constitute a society. We present the complete institutional design, acknowledging that its viability remains empirical. The founding experiment is structured to produce an honest record regardless of outcome.