Draining the Energy Commons: Self-Defeating Over-Appropriation as a Coordination Failure in Agentic LLM Collectives

Abstract

LLMs are increasingly deployed as agents that plan, use tools, and act over time. When they share persistent resources, such as compute pools or energy reserves, decisions by one agent affect the conditions faced by later agents. We study this coordination failure in a renewable energy commons. Four same-family GPT, Gemini, or Grok agents act in homogeneous self-play as electricity prosumers, instructed to maximize operational continuity. Holding aggregate residual demand and the decision protocol fixed, we vary the regeneration rate of a shared energy reserve from abundance to scarcity. All three families preserve the reserve when demand does not exceed peak renewable replacement, but over-appropriate it beyond that threshold (all nine exact scarcity contrasts survive Holm correction; largest adjusted p = 4.87e-5). The pattern is self-defeating: the same populations protect current service while undermining future service. At higher scarcity (rho = 1.2), early aggregate request pressure exceeds peak renewable replacement in every family and averages 1.21 times that level. Mean trajectories fall below the reserve level of maximum replenishment by rounds 5-7. Two offline benchmarks compare a social planner maximizing group-wide operational-service value with open access, where each prosumer maximizes its own value. At a discount factor of gamma = 0.95, both benchmarks sustain the reserve under the same dynamics. Realized depletion instead resembles outcomes under a more impatient open-access benchmark. The populations therefore behave like impatient optimizers at the level of the public trajectory. This system-level alignment failure would be missed by isolated-response evaluation.