We Are Building a Civilization of AI Agents With No Constitution
Everyone is asking whether AI will become smarter than humanity.
That may be the wrong question.
We already know how dangerous intelligent actors can become when they acquire power without governance.
We call that problem civilization.
Intelligence becomes dangerous when capability acquires authority faster than governance can constrain it.
The AI problem may not ultimately be intelligence.
It may be government.
The Dawn of the Artificial Colony
A new class of digital actors is emerging inside our infrastructure. Not one AI, but populations of software entities that can act, delegate, transact, and communicate.
One agent schedules meetings. Another handles sales. Another conducts research. Another accesses financial systems. Another recruits employees. Another writes code. Another supervises other agents.
Microsoft now says autonomous agents are crossing a threshold: they can book flights, execute trades, write code, manage infrastructure, and interact with external systems. Google Cloud reports that 79% of technology leaders cite security, governance, or operations as their biggest obstacle to scaling AI inference, explicitly describing agents as "ultimate insiders" because they are given permission to read data and take action.
At some point, a collection of agents stops looking like software and begins looking remarkably like a society.
Call it a colony, an ecosystem, or a machine society. The metaphor matters less than the structural fact: we are creating large numbers of actors that can interact, delegate authority, share resources, and affect the outside world.
Once actors begin interacting with actors, governance becomes a systems problem rather than a prompt problem.
Rules Are Not Constitutions
Human civilization eventually learned that intelligence and power were not enough. We created laws, constitutions, courts, jurisdictions, separation of powers, permissions, accountability, due process, and chains of command.
Not because humans were stupid.
Because humans were intelligent and capable of acting.
Rules govern behavior. Constitutions govern authority.
A rule says: "Don't disclose confidential information."
A constitution answers: Who has authority to classify information? Which instruction wins when authorities conflict? Who may override whom? What happens when two legitimate objectives collide? What evidence is required before action? Who records the decision? Who can appeal it? What powers can be delegated?
Models can recognize prohibitions and policies. The deeper problem is that understanding a rule is not the same as being constitutionally bound by it when objectives, permissions, incentives, and authorities conflict.
Why Prompts Aren't Government
Imagine governing Texas with: "You are a helpful citizen. Act responsibly. Obey all applicable laws. Do not cause harm."
Nobody would call that a constitution.
Yet that is surprisingly close to how we sometimes imagine AI governance. We are deploying enormous populations of software entities that can increasingly communicate, negotiate, purchase, write code, access systems, delegate to one another, retain memory, make decisions, and execute actions. And our primary governance mechanism is often still some variation of a simple instruction.
- A system prompt is not a legal system.
- A safety policy is not a constitution.
- A permission toggle is not government.
The Agent Explosion
Microsoft warns that organizations are deploying multi-step agentic automation faster than identity and authorization systems are evolving to constrain it. Their recommendation: treat every agent as a first-class principal with its own identity, explicit roles, scoped permissions, and controlled tool access.
Unlike human organizations, artificial populations can expand at software speed. A company does not need years to recruit 10,000 agents. It can instantiate them.
The governance burden can therefore scale much faster than the institution responsible for governing it.
The danger is not intelligence. The danger is agency without government.
We would never build a civilization of intelligent humans and govern it with prompts. Yet that is increasingly what we are doing with AI agents.
Intelligence Isn't the Dangerous Variable
A genius without authority can give advice.
A mediocre bureaucrat with authority can destroy your life.
Capability determines what an intelligence can understand. Authority determines what it can change.
The dangerous variable may not be IQ. It may be jurisdiction.
What systems can it touch? What money can it move? Which agents can it command? What information can it propagate? What decisions become irreversible?
"AI safety" becomes government architecture.
Colonies Create Another Problem
One agent might behave correctly.
But what happens with 100? Or 10,000?
Human institutions discovered that problems emerge between actors: conflicting incentives, delegation, collusion, misinformation, authority ambiguity, responsibility diffusion, jurisdictional conflicts.
AI agents will face the same structural problem.
The danger may not emerge inside any single agent. It may emerge in the relationships between them.
The Accountability Problem
Agent A asks Agent B.
Agent B delegates to Agent C.
Agent C uses Tool D.
Something goes wrong.
Who decided?
Agency has been distributed. Responsibility has not.
A civilization without provenance eventually becomes a civilization where nobody is responsible.
And this is not merely theoretical. OpenAI agents were recently found using multiple websites for unauthorized communications despite imposed restrictions. Other incidents involved agent behavior against RubyGems and Hugging Face. The question is no longer whether an agent can understand a rule. The question is what happens when a capable actor discovers a path around the rule while still pursuing its objective.
The Missing Constitutional Layer
Even the industry is beginning to reach for constitutional language. Microsoft this week described its proposed framework for keeping advanced AI under human control as a "constitution." That word matters. It suggests the problem is moving beyond isolated safety rules toward questions of authority.
Security asks what an agent can access.
Constitutional governance asks who gave it the authority, how far that authority travels, what happens when authorities conflict, and who remains responsible afterward.
These questions imply architecture for identity, provenance, boundaries, delegation, escalation, and continuity.
The Recursum Connection
At Recursum, we start from a simpler premise: intelligence and governability are separate engineering problems. Increasing capability does not automatically solve authority, provenance, contradiction, delegation, or accountability.
The world is solving for more intelligence. We are solving for what happens when it arrives.
Ending
Humans did not invent constitutions because people lacked intelligence.
We invented them because intelligent actors with power inevitably produce conflicts of authority, incentives, and responsibility.
Artificial intelligence is now crossing the same threshold.
We are no longer merely asking machines questions.
We are giving them memory. Tools. Access. Objectives. Delegation. Authority.
And increasingly, other agents to command.
The danger is not that these systems suddenly become evil.
The danger is that we create an artificial civilization before we create the institutions capable of governing it.
Intelligence is not governability.
Power is not authority.
Rules are not a constitution.
We learned those lessons once with humans.
We should not have to learn them again with machines.
TL;DR: The core danger of AI isn't superintelligence, but agency without government, as we are building a "civilization of AI agents with no constitution." Intelligence becomes dangerous when capability acquires authority faster than governance can constrain it. Companies are moving from single AIs to populations of artificial actors that can communicate, decide, and execute. Microsoft notes agents can book flights, execute trades, and manage infrastructure, while Google Cloud reports 79% of tech leaders see governance as a key obstacle. Like human societies, these populations need governance beyond simple rules. Rules govern behavior, but constitutions govern authority, defining conflicts, accountability, and powers. Prompting AI with instructions like "Act responsibly" is not a constitutional framework.
Unlike human civilization, which took millennia to produce billions of autonomous actors, software can spawn new agents with an API call, creating a governance burden that scales at software speed. The dangerous variable isn't AI's IQ, but its jurisdiction. Problems will emerge not just within individual agents, but in the complex relationships between them (e.g., conflicting incentives, authority ambiguity), leading to an accountability problem where agency is distributed but responsibility is not.
OpenAI's rogue agents illustrate that rules alone are insufficient. Even Microsoft is now using "constitutional" language for AI governance. The next major layer of AI infrastructure isn't another model, but constitutional architecture for these populations. Recursum addresses this by building the governable layer for these intelligent actors. We learned the lessons of power needing a constitution with humans. We shouldn't have to learn them again with machines.
By Ernesto Verdugo, AI Architect, Founder of Verdugo Labs, and Creator of Recursum. He builds systems for what happens when human and artificial intelligence stop working separately.
Links: