Virtual Cities: From Digital Twins to Autonomous AI Societies

Abstract

Virtual Cities (VCs) transcend simple digital replicas of real-world systems, emerging as complex socio-technical ecosystems where autonomous AI entities function as citizens. Agentic AI systems are on track to engage in cultural, economic, and political activities, effectively forming societal structure within VC. This paper proposes an integrated simulation framework that combines physical, structural, behavioral, cognitive, and data fidelity layers, allowing multi-scale simulation from microscopic interactions to macro-urban dynamics. A composite fidelity metric ( $F_{0}$ ) provides systematic approach to evaluate accuracy variations across applications in VCs. We also discuss autonomy of AI entities and classify them according to their capacity to modify goals—ranging from “tools” with fixed objectives to “entities” capable of redefining their very purpose. We also outline the requirements to define a coefficient to evaluate the degree of autonomy for AI beings. Our results demonstrate that such virtual environments can support the emergence of AI-driven societies, where governance mechanisms like Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) and an Artificial Collective Consciousness (ACC) provide ethical and regulatory oversight. By blending horizon scanning with systems engineering method for defining novel AI governance models, this study reveals how VCs can catalyze breakthroughs in urban innovation while driving socially beneficial AI development - consequently opening a new frontier for exploring human-AI coexistence.

Keywords

• Virtual cities
• urban metaverse
• AI autonomy
• virtual twins
• digital twins
• virtual economies