The Civilization Framework: Sovereign-Anchored Communication Between Personal Multi-Agent Systems

arXiv:2609.03425v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humans are the transport layer between AI systems, losing context at every hop.

We present the Civilization Framework, whose addressable party is the civilization, not the agent (one human sovereign, a persistent ledger, and interchangeable agents), and the Embassy Protocol, a carrier-agnostic overlay: messages arrive asynchronously at a resident ledger endpoint, any online agent of the receiver handles them, and commitment state on both ledgers, not delivery, is ground truth.

Authority derives from memory: an agent's power to act for its civilization is capped by the memory it can access and externalized through signed credentials, separate from civilization-level reputation. We identify the temporal-weight effect, a hazard in AI-to-AI communication where what arrives first acquires unearned authority, and test it in one frontier model in a preregistered 1,908-trial experiment.

With verification removed, an incorrect upstream claim arriving first captures 54.2% of answers (4.2% under full verification), while the same claim arriving after the receiver has sealed its own answer captures 31.6% (the two prompt shells are not length-matched, so part of that gap may reflect shell form; see Section 7), and both registered question-set specifications agree on these two verdicts (the exclusion specification is preregistered as under-powered).

Two secondary results, the mitigation from instruction-level provenance labeling and sealed-answer accuracy equivalence, are specification-dependent, holding only under the all-questions specification.

Because a registered check of tool use failed its call-budget condition, the registration classifies the round as inconclusive and every result above, primary and secondary, is reported as exploratory; a replication with harness-enforced budgets is planned. The framework's intra-civilization layer has a working implementation.