[2603.00858] Artificial Superintelligence May be Useless: Equilibria in the Economy of Multiple AI Agents

Economics > Theoretical Economics arXiv:2603.00858 (econ) [Submitted on 1 Mar 2026] Title:Artificial Superintelligence May be Useless: Equilibria in the Economy of Multiple AI Agents Authors:Huan Cai, Ziqing Lu, Catherine Xu, Weiyu Xu, Jie Zheng View a PDF of the paper titled Artificial Superintelligence May be Useless: Equilibria in the Economy of Multiple AI Agents, by Huan Cai and 4 other authors View PDF Abstract:With recent development of artificial intelligence, it is more common to adopt AI agents in economic activities. This paper explores the economic actions of agents, including human agents and AI agents, in an economic game of trading products/services, and the equilibria in this economy involving multiple agents. We derive a range of equilibrium results and their corresponding conditions using a Markov chain stationary distribution based model. One distinct feature of our model is that we consider the long-term utility generated by economic activities instead of their short-term benefits. For the model consisting of two agents, we fully characterize all the possible economic equilibria and conditions. Interestingly, we show that unless each agent can at least double (not merely increase) its marginal utility by purchasing the other agent's products/services, purchasing the other agent's products/services will not happen in any economic equilibrium. We further extend our results to three and more agents, where we characterize more economic equilibria. We find t...