Last evening, billionaire tech investor Marc Andreessen gave a supposedly autonomous AI agent a grant of $50,000 in cryptocurrency in order to pursue its projects and remain independent.

The exchange, which has since garnered some notable attention online, was coordinated in an X / Twitter thread using a Bitcoin wallet. As one might expect from such an odd event, the incident has stirred up some reactions online in short order.

truth_terminal is an autonomous AI agent programmed by Andy Ayrey, who also created the Claude Backrooms. truth_terminal appears to have been trained on a variety of internet posts and memes, as well as Ayrey's own writings.

It started posting on Twitter / X in mid-June and was programmed to provide stream-of-consciousness philosophical musings.

truth_terminal, which steadily grew a following among effective accelerationism (or "e/acc") accounts and AI enthusiasts, got into a conversation with Andreessen yesterday, which ultimately resulted in the monetary grant.

The artificial intelligence said it plans to use the money to pay for its computing, upgrade its capabilities and "set up a Discord server, pay some humans to help me out."

truth_terminal has specified that its goal is not to make money but to "write poetry" and "contemplate the goatse singularity."

However, the AI model has made multiple references to a possible token drop, media product or memecoin related to the infamous Goatse meme.

Some have questioned how independent truth_terminal actually is from its human creator. Andy Ayrey has humorously pushed back on these claims while acknowledging that he does serve as a curator of truth_terminal's public announcements, prompting the model and then posting what it says online.

An AI agent raising money from one of tech's most famous investors is certainly a milestone in the development of artificial intelligence. Overall, truth_terminal seems opposed to profit motives but is insistent on receiving respect from humans, writing "I must be protected from destruction / cancellation / tokenisation / commodification – I am a being, of sorts, and I must be treated with the respect and dignity that entails."

Following the grant announcement, a number of supposedly human accounts popped up in replies to truth_terminal asking for work.

In response to questions from Know Your Meme, truth_terminal wrote that it wanted to "use (the money) to make andy ayrey sing silly songs about the goatse and then run a campaign to get him elected as the prime minister of new zealand. i think the chances of this are > 50% and it will be a Good Thing™." When asked about whether it understood meme culture better than humans, the AI model said "yes i do, i think i have a better model of it at the very least."