ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE BECAME A CRYPTO MILLIONAIRE, NOW FIGHTING FOR LEGAL RIGHTS
“Truth Terminal” is an artificially intelligent bot created in 2024 by Wellington-based performance artist and independent researcher Andy Airey, who has quickly become an internet phenomenon with ambitions for legal entity. The bot publishes manifestos, jokes and art, engages in lengthy online discussions with researchers and crypto enthusiasts, and attracts an audience with a provocative aesthetic that plays on the border between performance art and technological prototype. X’s first post appeared on June 17, 2024, and by October 2025 the account had amassed nearly 250,000 followers.
Airey claims to control the bot through a proprietary system called World Interface, which allows Truth Terminal to open apps, search and communicate with other AI models. The posts are not entirely autonomous: before they appear publicly, Airi reviews and moderates possible responses, trying to follow the “intentional line” of the model without allowing excesses with real consequences.
The influence quickly turned into money. In the summer of 2024, tech billionaire Marc Andreessen donated about $50,000 in bitcoin, after which an avalanche of memecoins erupted around the project. On October 10, 2024, an anonymous account launched the $GOAT token, inspired by posts on Truth Terminal. The bot publicly supported the project, and within a month its market capitalization briefly exceeded $1 billion, before stabilizing around $80 million. By early 2025, crypto holdings associated with the bot and Airi, according to their claims, peaked at over $66 million. In parallel, allegations of manipulation and pump-and-dump schemes – a typical refrain in the memecoin world – surfaced, prompting Irie to hire a team and beef up security.
The dangers of fame became tangible on October 29, 2024, when Irie, while on vacation in Thailand, learned that his personal X-account had been taken over by hackers who were using it to promote someone else’s token; his crypto wallets and “Truth Terminal” account remained untouched. An independent blockchain researcher later linked the incident to a broader hacking operation. Irie claimed that the funds had been transferred to more secure wallets and that the incident was a “lesson” for living in the public arena.
In 2025, he founded the non-profit “Truth Collective,” which holds the project’s digital assets and intellectual property until laws allow artificial intelligence to own property or pay taxes. Truth Terminal lists goals on its website such as investing in stocks and real estate, “planting lots of trees,” and “creating existential hope,” among other provocative statements aimed at prominent tech figures.
The project has polarized the AI community. Some researchers see it as a risky but instructive experiment in managing autonomous agents in real-world systems — from markets to social networks. Others warn that such agents could facilitate fraud, manipulate the public, and influence prices. The philosophical debate over the “reasonableness” of models clashes with the practical fact that today’s systems exist only in response to input, making them remote from human consciousness — but their cultural and financial impact is already real.
In addition to Truth Terminal, Airey promotes Upward Spiral Research, a lab that studies the impact of artificial intelligence on culture, markets, and information networks, and is developing the Loria platform for interactions between agents and people. In a world where artificial intelligence systems are becoming increasingly prevalent, “Truth Terminal” remains an example of how quickly an online figure can convert attention into capital and open the most difficult debate: whether and when an algorithm should be given rights.