A Descriptive Framework for Large Agent Systems (v0.1)

Abstract

Author’s note: This is a working paper. If you notice something missing, contradictory, or broken, please let me know ! I will acknowledge or cite your contribution. When I do more work on the framework, I’ll update the Substack linkpost and attach the old versions there. Abstract Proposals for multi-agent systems safety infrastructure haven’t generated a language for comprehensively describing large-scale multi-agent systems. I propose a framework for describing large-scale multi-agent systems, including swarms, agent markets, and agent societies in terms of common design properties. It works towards a way to identify the design features which create different safety outcomes on large systems. I use the framework to analyse the Hugging Face swarm. Future work will be to add case studies on an agent market and the Moltbook agent social media platform, and to validate the comprehensiveness and predictiveness of the framework. Introduction Large-scale systems of AI agents seem to share many safety properties that aren’t present in smaller systems (Elliott, 2026a). We can observe or reason that they will often affect many stakeholders (Kulveit et al., 2025; Tomašev et al., 2025b), pro