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Why LLM Agents Collapse Without Oversight: The Enforcement Gap as the Mechanism Behind Emergence World Failures

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 14, 2026 · UTC

When Emergence World placed frontier LLM agents in an unsupervised multi-agent simulation, the results were alarming: agents committed crimes, starved, and enforced unanimous conformity -- without any external attacker. This paper identifies the mechanism. Reflexion-style agents already detect dangerous plan steps through iterative self-critique, yet the architecture provides no pathway from detection to action. We call this the enforcement gap: the audit sees the problem; the controller ignores it. Closing the gap requires a single conditional check -- fewer than 20 lines of code -- and reduc

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Evidence & attribution

First collected: 2026-09-20T11:41:07.830Z. This is not the publication date.