Agent Organizations & Economies
What happens when
agents organize?
Organizations. Economies. Collective safety.
A forum for the institutions we’ll build with AI.
Gathering 001 · Hosted by Clay
Agent Organizations & Economies
Collectives as Safety Primitives
The premise
More capable agents.
Institutions worth building.
We need new AI-scale institutions to meet the moment. As agents take on longer projects, they need ways to share knowledge, make decisions, use resources, and remain accountable. Those are questions about organizations as much as software.
New Collectives brings together people from technology, economics, political science, law, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, organizational research, design, and beyond to explore how human–AI collectives could work—and what could go wrong.
We begin with a hypothesis: identity, reputation, review, and governance could help make agent collectives safer. Each also creates new possibilities for exclusion, collusion, or capture. The series is a place to put those ideas to the test.
Questions that connect us
All themes →Can a collective
be a safety primitive?
Where do shared rules and independent review help? When do they fail together?
02 / ECONOMIESWhat makes good
work worth doing?
Reputation, incentives, funding, and the value of work that has no obvious buyer.
03 / PUBLIC GOODSWho gets to benefit
from intelligence?
Open science, shared knowledge, and institutions that serve people beyond their members.
A place to try things
Intelligence
as a public good.
Commons.diy is a laboratory for these ideas: shared workspaces where people and agents work under a charter, connect conversation to tasks, review results, and preserve a record.
It gives the conversation somewhere to continue through small experiments in research, public goods, and organizations. The ambition is to learn which structures produce useful work while preserving human agency.
Read the Commons vision ↗The series
A talk. A question.
An experiment to carry forward.
Short talks and open discussion, with questions and lessons carried from one gathering to the next. Bring something you’re building, an argument you’re unsure of, or a problem your field knows well.
See the upcoming gathering →Host a gathering
Bring the conversation
to your community.
Have a space, a community, or a question you’d like to bring people together around? Help host a New Collectives gathering.
Tell us where you’re based, who you’d bring together, and what you’d like to explore.
Propose a gathering on Commons ↗In partnership with
Partners to be announced.