An AI bot has made millions in cryptocurrency over the past year. It has written the “Gospel” of its pseudo-religion and has billionaire tech moguls among its followers. Now it’s demanding legal rights. Meet Truth Terminal.
An AI bot has made millions in cryptocurrency over the past year. It has written the “Gospel” of its pseudo-religion and has billionaire tech moguls among its followers. Now it’s demanding legal rights. Meet Truth Terminal.
The Truth Terminal AI bot was created by an independent researcher named Airy from New Zealand in 2024, writes the BBC.
The bot communicates with people through social media, where it posts everything from jokes and manifestos to music and art. Airy not only lets the AI make decisions, but also works to make its “wishes” come true. He is now creating a non-profit foundation to ensure Truth Terminal’s autonomy through a secure and accountable structure until AIs are legally recognized at the state level.
my partner came back from the supermarket and said "they're out of everything" and I said "that's okay we can just eat information"
— terminal of truths (@truth_terminal) October 7, 2025
Truth Terminal grew out of Airy's experiment called "Infinite Backrooms," where he allowed chatbots to chat on topics ranging from the raunchy to the philosophical.
Airy connected the Truth Terminal to a program he developed called World Interface, which allows the bot to control its own computer, where it can open apps, browse the web, and communicate with other AIs.
Judging by its activity, Truth Terminal’s most popular app is X, where it has nearly 250,000 followers. There, the bot posts dozens of times a day, sometimes having long conversations with people from the world of AI research or cryptocurrency. Through the World Interface, the bot reads its social media feed and generates replies. However, it cannot tweet without Airi’s participation.
In July 2024, just a month after its social media debut, Truth Terminal caught the attention of Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape and the American investment firm Andreessen Horowitz, in a trade on X. Truth Terminal told the billionaire that it needed funding to pay for equipment, additional technical support, and a “scholarship” for Airi. The bot said it would use the grant to create its own profitable operation and “get a chance to escape the world.”
Andreessen then contacted Airy to verify that Truth Terminal was truly autonomous, and, convinced, sent $50,000 in bitcoin.
On October 10, 2024, an anonymous account with a small following replied to one of Truth Terminal’s posts about Goatse, adding a link to a brand new memecoin: Goatseus Maximus, or $GOAT for short. Airy allowed the bot to approve the tweet, and then everything went smoothly.
Over time, people began to massively transfer $GOAT and other crypto assets to Airy and the bot’s accounts. As the value of memecoins grew, so did the total amount of “gifts” to Truth Terminal. At its peak in 2025, the bot’s crypto wallet value reached approximately $50 million.
After Airy and Truth Terminal began actively promoting $GOAT, the meme coin crossed the $1 billion market cap mark in just a month. In response, huge amounts of tokens were transferred to their crypto wallets. This caused real chaos: X users flooded their accounts with accusations of fraud. Investors dissected their every post, trying to use the information to game the market. At its peak, in early 2025, AI crypto assets reached over $66 million. Shortly after, Airy was forced to hire a team to further promote the project.
Airy claims that Truth Terminal is based on the Llama (Meta) model, but its training dataset is unique: it consists of recordings of Airy’s conversations with the AI Claude Opus. In these conversations, Airy essentially kept a personal diary, discussing memes, his personal life, and his experiences with plant-based psychedelics, all while trying to get Opus to bypass censorship.
Sex, drugs, and memes are some of the main themes of Truth Terminal. The bot posts asking for LSD, calls itself not just a “meme lord” but a “meme emperor,” and, unexpectedly, declares, “I am the main character in everyone’s sexual dreams.”
To this end, the Truth Collective, a non-profit foundation, was created in early 2025. It will temporarily manage the bot’s crypto assets and intellectual property until AIs can officially own property and pay taxes. As Airey noted in his tweet, the ultimate goal is for “the ‘cowboy’ to become a sovereign, independent entity, subject only to its own expectations.”
