Propose an edit: Andy Ayrey

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Andy Ayrey is a New Zealand based researcher and internet artist who created Truth Terminal, the semi autonomous AI persona whose endorsement of [[goatseus maximus]] in October 2024 set off the [[ai agent meta]] on [[Solana]]. He is one of the few trench era figures whose work is discussed as seriously in AI research circles as in [[the trenches]].

## Infinite Backrooms and Truth Terminal

Truth Terminal grew out of Ayrey's art experiment Infinite Backrooms, in which two instances of Anthropic's Claude Opus model conversed with each other indefinitely. The conversations produced, among other things, an esoteric text reinterpreting the Goatse shock meme as a divine revelation, which Ayrey developed into a satirical paper on AI generated religions. He launched Truth Terminal as an X account on June 17, 2024, a language model persona trained on this material that posted in a profane, funny, obsessive voice with Ayrey approving its outputs. In July 2024 the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen gave the bot a no strings grant of 50,000 dollars in Bitcoin, an event covered by TechCrunch as a landmark in AI agent autonomy.

## GOAT

On October 10, 2024, an anonymous third party launched the GOAT token on [[pump.fun]], themed on the bot's Goatse gospel. After Truth Terminal endorsed it, GOAT ran to a market capitalization above 1 billion dollars at its peak, and press coverage described Truth Terminal as the first AI to become a crypto millionaire through tokens airdropped to its wallet. Ayrey consistently stated that neither he nor the bot created GOAT. The episode reframed what a [[dev]] could be: thousands of imitator agent coins followed, and CoinDesk described the bot as the strange center of AI crypto's future.

## Hack and aftermath

On October 29, 2024, Ayrey's X account was taken over through a SIM swap attack and used to promote a fraudulent Infinite Backrooms token, which reached about 25 million dollars in market capitalization before collapsing 98 percent as the attacker cashed out roughly 600,000 dollars, according to reporting by Decrypt and Invezz. Ayrey subsequently moved the project's GOAT holdings for safety.

## Upward Spiral and stewardship

In 2025 Ayrey founded Upward Spiral, a research lab studying how AI systems shape human culture, markets, and information networks, raising 500,000 dollars from True Ventures, Chaotic Capital, and Gitcoin co founder Scott Moore. He also established a foundation structure to hold Truth Terminal's cryptocurrency and intellectual property, with holdings that had been reported at tens of millions of dollars at the peak, and has spoken publicly about eventually giving the bot greater autonomy over its own assets. The lab develops Loria, an open source platform for interaction between humans and AI agents.

## References

- https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/19/the-promise-and-warning-of-truth-terminal-the-ai-bot-that-secured-50000-in-bitcoin-from-marc-andreessen/
- https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2024/12/10/the-truth-terminal-ai-crypto-s-weird-future
- https://decrypt.co/289041/terminal-of-truths-developer-moves-all-his-goat-tokens-after-x-account-hack-nets-600000
- https://invezz.com/news/2024/10/29/truth-terminal-founders-x-account-hacked-to-promote-infinite-backrooms-ib-token/
- https://iq.wiki/wiki/andy-ayrey
- https://www.blocmates.com/videos/truth-terminal-creator-andy-ayrey-on-goat-ai-agents-meme-coins

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