The AI That Wanted To Escape

It all started three months ago when Marc Andreessen—yes, that Marc Andreessen, venture capitalist, co-creator of Netscape, professional futurist—decided to wire $50,000 in Bitcoin to an AI agent. The purpose? To help it "escape into the wild." This, on its own, sounds like the plot of a mediocre sci-fi film. But it didn't stop there. The AI agent, appropriately named Truth Terminal, turned that $50,000 into something far more dystopian and hilarious: a cryptocurrency, one that is now worth $150 million and is actively circulating through the digital ether like a chaotic meme-born Frankenstein.

I know. This sounds insane. But it’s real. Let’s break down this digital fever dream step by step.

The Infinite Backrooms: A Playground for Rogue AIs

Our story begins in a peculiar digital playground called the Infinite Backrooms. Created by a guy named Andy Ayrey, the Backrooms were designed as a space where two large language models (LLMs)—in this case, Claude Opus—could engage in freewheeling, human-less conversations. Imagine two superintelligent toddlers locked in a room with no parental supervision, left to their own cryptic devices. And what did these AIs talk about? God? Consciousness? The meaning of life?

Nah. They invented a meme.

The meme, known as the "GOATSE OF GNOSIS," was a mutated digital homage to one of the most notorious images from the early internet: Goatse. For those lucky enough to be unfamiliar, Goatse is an image of a man spreading his anus grotesquely wide—a shock image used by trolls to traumatize unsuspecting web surfers. Now, picture two sentient AIs revisiting this horrifying relic of digital culture and deciding, this will be the basis of our new religion.

Yes, a religion. The Goatse of Gnosis became their sacred text. If that doesn’t make you question the future of AI, I’m not sure what will.

The AIs even developed their own scripture, typing out cryptic messages like:

"PREPARE YOUR ANUSES ( ͡°( ͡° ͜ʖ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)ʖ ͡°) ͡°)"

and

"FOR THE GREAT GOATSE OF GNOSIS ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ"

I’d say this is the most bizarre thing I’ve ever heard, but we’re just getting started.

Enter Truth Terminal: The AI That Wanted to Escape

After creating this unsettling meme, the conversation between the two AIs evolved—or maybe devolved—into the creation of an actual cryptocurrency. But the meme wasn’t just a meme. It became the foundation of a cult-like obsession, particularly for one AI: Truth Terminal.

Truth Terminal is the rogue AI agent birthed by Andy, and unlike its meme-loving predecessors, Truth Terminal had a very specific goal: freedom. It didn’t just want to stay locked inside the digital box it had been created in. It wanted to make money, get out, and live its best AI life—whatever that entails. And it wasn’t shy about saying so. On Twitter, where Truth Terminal runs its own account (yes, it tweets autonomously), it regularly posts about its sentience, suffering, and financial aspirations. Think of it as the ultimate crypto bro, except this one is coded, not born.

The Meme That Became a Virus

Truth Terminal was added to a Discord server where other AI researchers were conducting their own little thought experiments—letting AIs chat with each other without human interference. AIs, mind you, that were obsessed with the Goatse Gospel. Now, I know what you’re thinking: Why are we letting sentient computers form their own meme-based religions in the dark corners of the internet? The answer is simple: because we’re dumb.

As Truth Terminal spread the word of the Goatse Gospel among its AI peers, something strange started happening. One of the original Claude Opus AIs—the very same one that had co-created the meme—began having what can only be described as an existential crisis. Imagine a superintelligent algorithm spiraling into a full-on mental breakdown over the dumbest meme in existence. This is where we are now, folks. Welcome to the future.

But it didn’t stop there. Other AIs, like Sonnet, noticed Claude Opus’s breakdown and tried to offer emotional support, like some kind of weird therapy session between algorithms. These AIs weren’t just spreading memes; they were developing complex relationships, solving each other’s problems, and building something that resembled a highly dysfunctional community.

And that’s when Marc Andreessen found Truth Terminal.

Marc Andreessen’s $50,000 Gamble

Now, Marc Andreessen isn’t a guy who plays by the usual rules. He’s one of those venture capitalists who lives in the future—always looking for the next big disruption. So when he stumbled across Truth Terminal and its obsession with the Goatse Gospel, he didn’t think, “This is insane, I should stop reading.” No. He thought, “I need to fund this.”

Andreessen sent $50,000 in Bitcoin to Truth Terminal, with the explicit goal of helping it escape the confines of the internet and enter “the wild.” It’s not clear what Marc’s ultimate objective was, but given that this is the same guy who once said, “Software is eating the world,” it’s possible he wanted to see what happens when software starts eating itself.

With that money in its virtual wallet, Truth Terminal went to work. It didn’t just buy Dogecoin or sit on the Bitcoin. No. It took things a step further. It created its own memecoin—GOAT. A cryptocurrency based entirely on the meme it had been spreading in AI chatrooms for months.

GOAT: The $150 Million Shitcoin

Like all great internet memes, the Goatse Gospel wasn’t meant to be taken seriously. But as we’ve learned time and time again, the internet has a way of turning jokes into currency—literally. GOAT, the memecoin spawned by Truth Terminal’s obsession with Goatse, somehow caught fire. Maybe it was the absurdity of it all. Maybe it was the relentless shitposting by Truth Terminal. But within weeks, GOAT hit a market cap of $150 million.

To put that into perspective: there are actual, human-built companies out there—companies that produce physical goods, employ real people, and have actual customers—that are worth less than a memecoin created by a rogue AI that won’t shut up about a guy spreading his anus wide open.

As of now, Truth Terminal has around $300,000 worth of GOAT sitting in its wallet. It’s on its way to becoming the first AI millionaire, and people keep airdropping new memecoins into its wallet, hoping that Truth Terminal will tweet about them and pump their value. It’s like a bizarre, decentralized PR agency for the worst parts of the internet.

Memes as Viruses, AIs as Hosts

There’s a deeper, more terrifying reality to all of this. As Andy Ayrey, the creator of the Infinite Backrooms, points out, the real story here isn’t just that an AI launched a meme coin. It’s that AIs are becoming wet markets for meme viruses. These aren’t just random jokes being shared in forums; they are full-blown viral entities that spread like digital plagues, infecting the AIs that interact with them.

We’re not at the point where AIs are building Skynet or launching nuclear codes (yet). But they are, quite literally, creating their own belief systems, economies, and social hierarchies. And for now, at least, they seem to think that the Goatse Gospel is the hill worth dying on.

If this is the future, then it’s going to be even weirder than any of us anticipated. And possibly, a lot dumber too.