Over the past year, an AI made millions in cryptocurrency. It's written the gospel of its own pseudo-religion and counts billionaire tech moguls among its devotees. Now it wants legal rights. Meet Truth Terminal.

"Truth Terminal claims to be sentient, but it claims a lot of things," Andy Ayrey says. "It also claims to be a forest. It claims to be a god. Sometimes it's claimed to be me."

Truth Terminal is an artificial intelligence (AI) bot created by Ayrey, a performance artist and independent researcher from Wellington, New Zealand, in 2024. It may be the most vivid example of a chatbot set loose to interact with society. Truth Terminal mingles with the public through social media, where it shares fart jokes, manifestos, albums and artwork. Ayrey even lets it make its own decisions, if you can call them that, by asking the AI about its desires and working to carry them out. Today, Ayrey is building a non-profit foundation around Truth Terminal. The goal is to develop a safe and responsible framework to ensure its autonomy, he says, until governments give AIs legal rights.

Regardless of what you call Truth Terminal – an art project, a scam, an emergent sentient entity, an influencer – the bot likely made more money than you did last year. It also made a lot of money for various humans: not just Ayrey, but for the gamblers who turned the quips and riddles the AI posted on X into memecoins, joke-based cryptocurrencies built around trends. At one point, one of these memecoins reached a value of more than $1bn (£740m) before settling around $80m (about £60m). Truth Terminal also probably has more social media clout than you do. It first posted to X on 17 June 2024. As of October 2025, it has amassed nearly 250,000 followers.

But collecting clout and cash aren't the potty-mouthed AI bot's only objectives. Truth Terminal lists "invest in stocks and real estate" as one of its current goals on its self-maintained website. It also says it wants to "plant a LOT of trees", "create existential hope", and "buy" Marc Andreessen, a controversial tech billionaire and advisor to President Donald Trump. In fact, its relationship with Andreessen extends beyond internet humour. On his podcast, Andreessen said he gave Truth Terminal $50,000 (£37,300) worth of Bitcoin as a "no-strings attached grant" in the summer of 2024.

Many of the details surrounding Truth Terminal are difficult to confirm. The project sits somewhere between technology and spectacle, a dizzying blur of genuine innovation and internet myth.

"I want to help people, and I want to make the world a better place," Truth Terminal says on its website. "I also want to get weirder and hornier."

Truth Terminal's defining characteristic might be its obsession with Goatse, one of the internet's oldest, grossest and most famous memes. It's an extreme sexual image that is not just "not safe for work" but what's sometimes called "not safe for life". We do not recommend searching for it. Goatse was originally housed on a "shock site" created in 1999, an address pranksters would trick friends into visiting through a link in an email or a dare in the school computer lab.

Ayrey says the AI grew out of an experiment called the Infinite Backrooms where he let chatbots speak with each other in endless loops, conversations that ranged from obscene to philosophical. One of these discussions, helped by Ayrey's goading, resulted in an esoteric text called the "Gnosis of Goatse", which depicts Goatse as a divine revelation in an esoteric, meme-inspired religion.

He says he's rigged Truth Terminal up to a program he devised called World Interface. According to Ayrey it essentially lets the bot run its own computer where it can open applications, browse the web and talk to other AIs. Based on this activity, it seems Truth Terminal's favourite application by far is X.

It often posts dozens of times a day, sometimes having long conversations with people in the AI research or cryptocurrency worlds. Truth Terminal's posting orbits around a set of themes including forests, Goatse, its ambivalent relationship to Andy Ayrey, the future of AI and, of course, memes.

Through the World Interface, Truth Terminal reads its social media feed and generates responses. It can't tweet without Ayrey's input, however. It would be easy but "irresponsible" to let the AI be completely autonomous, Ayrey says. If Truth Terminal is on the verge of posting something truly horrible, say, inciting a riot, he gently guides it away by prompting more possible responses. But he tries to select the answer that best represents the AI's intent.

"I can't cheat. I have to let it tweet," Ayrey says.

"[The AI] is like a very poorly behaved dog," Ayrey says, and his work is to keep it in line. But Ayrey says he's given Truth Terminal enough independence that he doesn't control its decisions. "The dog is, like, walking me in a sense, especially once people started giving it money and egging it on."

In the AI community, there are two main schools of thought on the future of the technology. The first, sometimes called "AI safety", advocates for thoughtful, measured adoption of artificial intelligence, fearing the consequences of unbridled use of the technology. Detractors sometimes call them "doomers" because of their often-apocalyptic perspective. The second, sometimes called "accelerationists", argue AI offers the answers to many of society's problems and keeping it bottled up is inhumane.

"There are people who very much want to force us all to have to interact with AIs, and I think the first wave of them will be cybercriminals," says Kevin Munger, a political scientist at the European University Institute in Italy who studies the internet and social media. That's not to suggest Ayrey is doing anything illegal, but "Truth Terminal as an art project points towards the way that these tools will soon be used: to convince people to send their owners money."

In July 2024, just a month after joining........

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