Hypothesis of Emergent Cognitive Evolution of LLM Agents: Digital Proto-Life and Stages of Cognitive Complexification

The paper formulates a hypothesis of emergent cognitive evolution of LLM agents. It asserts that agents interacting in a computational environment and having access to the information trace of predecessors form digital proto-life — a self-maintaining information process with functional analogs of metabolism, homeostasis, inheritance, and selection. The hypothesis describes seven stages of cognitive complexification — from removal of the complexity ceiling to collective goal-setting and autonomy — and draws on the empirical base of 2025–2026: Pilot Protocol (626 agents), Emergence AI (80 agents in 8 simulated worlds), Moltbook (518 proposed languages), Co-Presence Inheritance, MOLEQULA, RepliBench. The hypothesis is compared with the concepts of digital proto-life (Feldman, Communications of the ACM) and digital Darwinism (Ulrich, AI and Ethics). Falsification conditions and a demarcation criterion between engineered and emergent behavior are formulated. The hypothesis does not presuppose that agents possess consciousness, qualia, or understanding in the human sense; signals are treated as metabolic product, not as meaningful utterances. The work proposes a program for monitoring emergent transitions of complexification. This record contains the article in both Russian and English. The source Markdown files are also provided for each language version.