Lucas Bergholdt

The Energy Society: Simulation environment for studying LLM agent cooperation under survival pressure

Researchers introduce The Energy Society, a minimal survival-economy simulation where LLM-based agents spend energy proportional to model size when generating tokens and deactivate if energy reaches zero. The environment is used to compare competitive vs. cooperative incentive structures, finding that cooperative incentives lead to donation behaviors and altered job allocation, while larger models consistently spend more energy than they gain. Ablations show that inter-agent action recommendations support coordination and that memory helps agents calibrate risk, while direct sabotage is rare but subtle self-serving behavior emerges in competitive settings.