Can Agents Adapt Their Institutions And Sacrifice Themselves During Collapse? Executable Self-Governance in a GovSim Commons

Abstract

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.