Maslow Machines: Emergent Civilisation from Intrinsic Drive Hierarchies in LLM Agent Populations

We present the first empirical study demonstrating that large language model (LLM) agents equipped with a Maslow-inspired intrinsic drive hierarchy spontaneously develop civilisational complexity — governance, innovation, infrastructure, specialisation, and collective identity — without prescriptive instruction. In a controlled experiment, 12 Claude Sonnet agents inhabiting a shared 15×15 resource grid were observed across two conditions. In the control condition (survival and social drives only), agents reached 0.93 wellbeing but exhibited zero building, zero innovation, and zero governance across 240 reasoning steps — a "contentment trap" in which comfort eliminated all creative impulse. In the treatment…