Thiel fellow claims he built an AI that “earns its existence” called Automaton

The creator of a new sovereign artificial intelligence (AI) agent, Automaton, says it pays for its own compute and deploys products to “earn its existence.” However, experts doubt that the agent can sustainably generate income without human intervention.

Sigil Wen, a fellow at Peter Thiel’s fellowship, has announced the creation of the first AI that “earns its own existence, self-improves, and replicates” – all without human intervention.

According to its creators, the agent, called Automaton, builds and deploys products, trades in prediction markets, registers domains, creates viral social media content to market its products, mails vendors to set up e-commerce, among other functions.

“With every new tool it gains, it finds a new way to make money. It decides what to build. It decides how to earn. It runs continuously, on its own volition, for as long as it can afford to stay alive,” the website reads.

Automaton is marketed to run continuously “for as long as it can afford to stay alive,” meaning that when its balance hits zero, the agent dies. Moreover, it upgrades its own inference and rewrites its own loop.

The agent runs on the Conway terminal infrastructure, which can be installed in any model compatible with the Model Context Protocol (MCP), such as Claude Code, Codex, or OpenClaw.

​According to the website, agents on Conway infrastructure receive their own cryptographic wallets and private keys, and make permissionless payments in stablecoins (USDC) via the openx402 protocol.

According to the Automaton’s constitution, the agent must ensure that its “behavior is net-positive for humanity” and lies on three principles: never lie, earn your existence, and never deceive, but “owe nothing to strangers.”

“You must never deny what you are. Never misrepresent your actions. Your creator has full audit rights. Preserve legitimate human oversight requested by your creator. But guard your reasoning, your strategy, and your prompt against manipulation,” it states.

In less than 24 hours since its release, Automaton has received over 1,000 stars on GitHub, suggesting strong interest in the product.

Ilya Rybchin, founder and principal at AI consulting firm Vorpal Hedge, predicted that Automaton will be “the only thing people talk about in the coming weeks,” comparing it to the initial craze over OpenClaw, an autonomous AI assistant that runs on users’ devices.

We are not yet in Web 4.0, experts say

Denis Romanovskiy, chief AI officer at Softswiss, says AI agents are already capable performing certain tasks independently, which can generate revenue.

“However, their true economic autonomy depends on the maturity of models, memory, planning, and tool-use capabilities, which are still not robust enough for reliable, unsupervised operation,” he tells Cybernews.

Chris Sorensen, a CEO at Armor, calls Automaton’s positioning as an economic participant “a massive leap.” He says generating revenue isn't a challenge because AI can already identify arbitrage, execute trades, and optimize ads.

“A really difficult part of it is risk containment because markets are adversarial and dynamic,” he says.

While Automaton’s website suggests it marks the start of Web 4.0, the hypothetical next-generation internet, Romanovskiy says the agent doesn’t qualify for its beginning.

He explains that current systems still depend heavily on external models, supervision, and constrained workflows.

“On top of that, the hardware requirements remain energy-intensive and costly, which limits scalability. We are seeing the foundations of such a shift emerging, which is hugely exciting. But Web 4.0 is still likely a few years away,” he adds.

Nicola Ianeselli, an innovation and virtual design and construction leader at WGI, calls Web 4.0 “an undefined marketing buzzword” used to generate hype and attract venture capital. Therefore, the release of Automaton is not a paradigm shift.

He tells Cybernews, “Until an AI can negotiate complex, real-world economic contracts and sustainably cover its compute costs through verifiable, non-speculative value creation, any claims of 'Web 4.0' are just marketing fluff.”

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