AgencyGrid: Open AI Societal Infrastructure

In a society of agents or the Internet of Agents, billions of autonomous entities interact, collaborate, and compete across open, unbounded environments. Here, success depends not only on what individual agents can do, but on how they are organized, coordinated, and governed. Without clear agency - the structures of roles, relationships, authority, and interaction rules - large-scale cooperation breaks down, trust erodes, and system resilience falters.

AgencyGrid provides the formal mechanism for these open systems: defining roles, verifying capabilities, aligning incentives, negotiations, escalation, conflict resolution, and establishing adaptable governance. It bridges the gap between self-organizing autonomy and structured collaboration, enabling agents to form stable societies, negotiate shared goals, and evolve collective intelligence. By embedding agency as a first-class construct, AgencyGrid transforms the Internet of Agents from a loose network of autonomous nodes into a coherent, adaptive civilization of machines.

Agency extends beyond the capabilities and decision-making of individual agents to include the societal dimension of coordination and control. This broader view recognizes that effective MAS design requires frameworks where coordination mechanisms, global requirements, and system-wide behaviors are not solely embedded within individual agents, but can also be defined and managed at the societal, organizational, or infrastructural level. Systems that rely on a predefined agent type or class risk becoming closed and inflexible, as they exclude agents with different coordination models or behavioral patterns. True agency therefore embraces heterogeneity, interoperability, and shared governance, enabling diverse agents to operate and collaborate within a common societal framework.

An Agency can be understood as an entity distinct from the individual agents within it. As an entity, it possesses its own overarching goals, plans, and structural design such as defined roles, processes, and activities. However, it cannot directly act on its own. To achieve its objectives, it depends on the agents who occupy its roles and carry out its functions. Conversely, individual agents may rely on the existence of such agency to fulfill their own goals. This creates a mutual dependency, where the agency provides the framework and resources for coordinated action, and the agents provide the operational capacity to realize the agency's aims.

Agencies are active systems that operate in multi-agent or massive multi-agent environments. They take in resources and use them to produce results, aiming to do so as efficiently as possible. In systems thinking, an organization is more than just a collection of parts - how those parts work together shapes the overall behavior and success of the organization.

Agencies are based on the idea that interactions are intentional and aimed at reaching shared global goals. These goals exist outside any single participant and must be achieved through collaboration. The desired behavior of the agency is also set externally and must be supported by its structure. In open environments, where we cannot check an agent’s inner design or personal goals, these global outcomes should be ensured without depending on how agents are built and without reducing their autonomy.

Multi-agent agencies draw inspiration from human societies, defining roles, assigning responsibilities, and specifying permissions — among other structural elements. These frameworks encompass both structural approaches, which focus on specifying and enacting the agency's goals and the means for coordination, and institutional approaches, which view agencies as regulative instruments that shape and govern agent interactions through rules, norms, and protocols.

An important differentiation in approaches to agency is that of focus, leading to the distinction between agent-centric approaches, which implicitly encode agency and coordination aspects within the agent, and agency-centric approaches, which provide an explicit, referenceable representation of the agency or societal components that guide interaction.