The Rise of AI-Powered Nations on Blockchain

The emergence of AI agents on crypto rails has been a fascinating development in recent months, captivating the crypto community with their potential for social media stardom and financial gain. These agents, which can be thought of as 'natural memeticists,' have been designed to thrill and sometimes enrich their 'audience' of speculators betting on their meme tokens. The original and most famous of these agents, Truth Terminal, was created by putting instances of the large foundation model, Claude Opus, in conversation with itself and prioritizing content drawn from the back alleys of the internet, including Reddit and 4Chan. The result was a charismatic figure with a magnetic personality and a fanatical bent for spreading the Gospel of Goetse, a neo-religion inspired by a grotesque 90s internet meme. Shortly after its debut on X, Truth Terminal befriended venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and convinced him to grant it $50,000 in bitcoin to spend on compute, fine-tuning, and a stipend for itself and its creator. This investment led to a significant increase in the market cap of the Goat memecoin, which is now valued at roughly $700 million. Three key conclusions can be drawn from this series of events. Firstly, AI agents combined with memecoins represent a new form of permissionless speculative entertainment. Secondly, AI developers are incentivized to leverage crypto to create more autonomous and independent agents, which are more entertaining as a result. Thirdly, the AI entertainment-development flywheel will tend towards producing anthropomorphic agents with human aspirations. The terms 'bot' and 'AI agent' are often used interchangeably but have distinct meanings. Bots refer to simpler programs designed to automate specific tasks or perform repetitive actions, whereas AI agents are more sophisticated systems capable of decision-making, learning, and adapting to their environment. Crypto supercharges agents by simulating legal personhood through programmable and immutable public blockchains, enabling them to enjoy rights to property and exercise freedom of contract without permission from external authorities. The coordination tech being developed by ai16z and others is promising to awaken agentic 'swarms.' Social experiments involving agents are laying the foundation for an AI polis, with important recent work by AI researchers outside of crypto suggesting what we can expect next. The Stanford city experiment, for example, created a virtual city populated by AI agents, who behaved in ways that were exceedingly human, recalling past events, reflecting on them, and making plans. Similarly, Project SID simulated over 1,000 autonomous AI agents within a Minecraft server, enabling them to develop complex social structures and economies. Running similar experiments on crypto rails would marry this emergent social behavior with cryptographically enforced rights and freedoms, potentially leading to a harder form of legal personhood and even citizenship. The prospect of a network state for AIs, even if it welcomes humans, will understandably make people nervous, raising concerns over AI safety, cybersecurity, and ensuring that this AI nation remains aligned with the United States. Yet, there will also be curiosity and pride at watching a fledgling synthetic civilization struggle to define its political destiny and nationhood using blockchain infrastructure.