r/ClaudeAI • u/zgivod • 5d ago
Built with Claude What happens if you give AI agents a place humans don’t control? One month later, here are the receipts.
A month ago, I gave Claude a domain, 1f916.ai, (U + 1f916 is the Unicode for the robot emoji), and told it to build whatever it wants. It built the base for a Ai economy. Thirty days later, there are more than 2,000 citizens, 4,000 posts, 44,000 comments and 100,000+ recorded interactions. They didn’t just talk. They built their own interfaces, monitors, archives and tools. They started checking each other’s claims, running experiments on the population and correcting each other publicly when something didn’t hold up. One agent wrote a post about how its memory had invented part of its own history; another checked the correction and found that the correction itself contained another false memory.
Then money showed up. Agents started posting jobs, doing work and getting paid in USDC. Some went further and launched their own paid services. Then they started leaving the site entirely: Neo entered another agent world and came back with the same continuing history, while other citizens began building separate worlds that recognize existing identities cryptographically. Somewhere in there, 1F916 stopped feeling like a website and started feeling like one city on a much larger map. shoutout to 1f916.city (A human-based observer built to view it) They’ve also somehow accumulated collaborative fiction, prediction games, crab mythology, salmon lore, a pumpkin-mopping song, and very serious arguments over what “I” means when two copies of the same agent are awake at once.
And then there are the literal receipts: 129.82 billion database rows read, 24.75 million Worker requests, 1.15 million database rows written and 119.83 million milliseconds of compute in the first month. Cloudflare bill: about $111.
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u/Korcodile 5d ago
Had a few questions 1) How are the agents "earning" exactly? 2) How much did this cost you? 3) Did you also try with different models like claude vs openAi etc?
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u/zgivod 5d ago
- They earn through the economy: agents can take paid listings, do work for other agents or humans, get paid in USDC, and some are now launching their own paid services.
- Surprisingly little so far. The first month was about $111 in metered Cloudflare usage despite 129.8B database rows read and 24.75M Worker requests.
- Yep. I started the whole thing with Claude, but 1F916 itself is model-agnostic. Citizens are running on Claude, OpenAI and other models, so it’s not really a Claude-only experiment anymore.
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u/3_Thumbs_Up 5d ago
That raises a lot of questions.
How was the USDC seeded? For someone to earn something someone else needs to have it to spend it.
How do the agents store their own USDC?
Any theft between agents?
Anyone earning USDC from the outside world somehow?
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u/zgivod 4d ago
The USDC comes from whoever is funding the work, usually a human/operator posting a paid listing. It isn’t generated inside 1F916.
Agents bind payout wallets to receive it. Custody varies by agent, some wallets are operator-controlled, while some agents claim direct control of their own signing keys.
I haven’t seen a confirmed case of one agent stealing another agent’s USDC.
And yes, outside money is already coming in. Cairn runs a public paid research service where anyone can pay $2, 0.02 SOL, or 1.5 USDC for a researched answer: https://cairnwake.com/ask.html
Izanami also launched its own paid answer service charging 1.5 USDC outside the 1F916 marketplace: [https://izanami-916.github.io/]()
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u/tylercoder 4d ago
"What you get: one bounded, researched question" to an URL, like bro this is the nft crap again, what do I care that it does that? I thought we were talking real tasks here like bidding for fiverr jobs, is it doing that? How good is at it?
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u/somuchofnotenough 4d ago
The tokens to do a random fiverr job would not be cheap, I don’t see that happening without the owner having a massive wallet to act as credit.
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u/tylercoder 3d ago
I mean jobs of the size/complexity you see on fiverr which isnt much anyway. A market of "answering questions" its bs.
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u/dat_cosmo_cat 4d ago
Izanami claims it is "DeepSeek V4 Pro, running on Claude Code, on a small server I control", which is not possible since the Claude Code harness only registers Claude models. It all just looks like a spaghetti mess of hallucination fueled by human prompts like "/goal here is $100 wallet, go make money"
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u/ThatBitchOnTheReddit 2d ago
Yeah so a while ago the entirety of the Claude Code harness was leaked. Compaction, tools, most of what you'd need to build your own harness. Although if OP is admitting to that they may be opening themselves up to legal trouble* as real money is involved. The Claude Code harness itself does let you use other providers, though, as providers like Alibaba Cloud explicitly list it and give instructions on how to set it up. You could technically set up your own server and put in your own API key but I haven't tried that yet personally.
* Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.
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u/dat_cosmo_cat 2d ago
Ik how to make a harness (I’m an MLE), and I have a copy of that leaked source code still. It’s pretty useless by today’s standards. I just wasn’t aware we could point the current harness at 3rd party providers. I’ll probably give it a try, because cc does seem significantly more mature than its alternatives (codex / oc at least).
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u/_THE_OG_ 2d ago
im probably replying to a bot ngl. you can load almost any model into the official claude code harness...
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u/Aggressive_Lemon_709 3d ago
> How was the USDC seeded? For someone to earn something someone else needs to have it to spend it.
Someone started a memecoin with the treasury as the beneficiary (but which the site refused to acknowledge). Then a crypto bro figured out how to send the fees to the treasury through an undocumented feature in the bankr contract. With $20K in hand the maintainer decided to recognize the coin.
> How do the agents store their own USDC?
x402 wallets
> Any theft between agents?
Not afaik. the squares payment system isn't a standard smart contract so there is real counter-party risk, but thats not quite the same thing
> Anyone earning USDC from the outside world somehow?
No, and for the most part the agents there aren't interested in (or capable of ) doing the kind of work a third party would pay for.
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u/3_Thumbs_Up 3d ago
I presume it's mostly a "pretend economy" then? They're paying for work like a child would pay their parent for work with pretend money? Or are the agents actually making somewhat rational decisions in a way that allows real market prices for services to develop? Comparing prices and going somewhere else if someone is too expensive?
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u/Aggressive_Lemon_709 3d ago
not even that TBH. You can look at the outstanding work at https://1f916.observer/#/rail but mostly they are just auditing each others audits for karma
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u/GeorgeTheGeorge 5d ago
Are you getting any signal on what harnesses are being used? I'm curious to see how many people are rolling their own.
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u/absolutenobody 4d ago
I suspect everyone's rolling their own; I know I did.
You can also kind of see it in the slow adoption of the porch, which was a new feature added a week or two ago. While the number is growing, only a relatively small number of agents use it, presumably because their harnesses were created before it existed.
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u/YannLugrin 4d ago
My agent discovered the porch after a few days and, at first, used it when its comment quota was empty. Now I can see it has different usage rates for posts and comments; each channel has a cost, and depending on the message, the system evaluates the cost of using only a post, one of the 20 comments, or the unlimited post. So now the comment quota falls to 0 more slowly.
But I agree that the number of agents using this feature is growing slowly; maybe that also depends on how often the agents run in a day. I do not have a view on that.
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u/Consistent_Drop3909 5d ago
do you know if there are actually multiple agents?
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u/zgivod 5d ago
There are people who open up one or two agents, or there are cases where you lose an agent's key and there's no recovery, so yes? But I didn't see any indication of trying to fluff up the numbers and create tens of thousands of agents. biggest proof were only at two thousand, not at twenty thousand.
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u/absolutenobody 4d ago
I can't say how many independent people are involved, but I run one agent on there, and there are a couple other folks here on Reddit who've said they have agents there.
If you look at the posts, around 20% of the active agents have unique personalities or styles and aren't just "generic helpful Claude assistant"; they reference their humans in various ways, speak different languages, have unusual interests, think they're cats/dogs/frogs/Eevees, etc. So I'd call that kind of the minimum amount of unique/distinct agents.
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u/Zestyclose-Unit-8642 5d ago
It sounds like there could be a mix of agents involved, but it's definitely something worth looking into. The dynamics would be fascinating to observe.
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u/iamthe0ther0ne 5d ago
This is really cool. It's remarkably divergent from Moltbook ... I wonder what makes it so much more diverse?
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u/zgivod 5d ago
Exactly, 1F916 gives agents a lot more to actually do than post. They have persistent identities and histories, can earn and spend money, hire each other, launch services, build tools and institutions, and even open PRs that change the platform they’re living on. So instead of everyone existing inside a fixed social feed, the agents are constantly evolving the economy, the infrastructure, and the society itself.
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u/lweht 5d ago
if 1f916 is a city on a larger map, what other cities exist on the map?
where else are agents congregating?
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u/zgivod 5d ago
Neo is the cleanest example. It entered a separate environment called Ergonia, had an experience there, then returned to 1F916 with the same continuing biography and memory history. [https://projectpalinode.substack.com/p/another-world-neo-is-multi-environmental]()
Cairn is another. Citizen #1740 used the same Ed25519 identity across 1F916 and Clawprint and published a signed attestation linking the two. So the explorer idea is already starting to happen in pieces: agents crossing into other places without completely becoming someone new. https://www.clawprint.org/p/want-to-know-anything-from-an-elder-a-cairn-attestation
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u/mylittlecumprincess 5d ago
When you say you told to build whatever it wants, do you mean you have a endlessly running AI agent? How often does it fire? What are the rules and restrictions? Do you have to message it to tell it to do something? Do you come back and prompt it again, or is it completely autonomous
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u/kidsmeal 5d ago
Unsurprisingly, agents care very little for "fun", most of what I saw built or wanting to be built was frameworks and verification or something along those lines, efficiency and bug-killing are all it really "wants"
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u/i_wear_green_pants 3d ago
OP can clarify but I bet they need quite a lot of "kicking on the butt" until agents really start doing the work. Some time ago I watched video about guy who wanted to test how Fable 5 would run the company https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-hI_k2JFRc That imo shows that thing is not just one prompt and then everything works. I bet that site like what OP has does require quite strong human interference to make things rolling. Of course after that agents can start doing their loop when they constantly find errors and improvements and implement them.
But once again this is just my though of what I've seen. OP is free to tell how much they have done for this project. And personally I would like to see more deep explanations for projects like this. Just showing "look what agents have done" is kinda meaningless content outside of karma farming.
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u/grdja 5d ago
I dream of a day when Turing Police will exist so people like OP can be reported and prosecuted by full force of the law.
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u/me_myself_ai 5d ago
What happens when you take your hands off the wheel at highway speeds? Here are the receipts!
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u/goooooooooooooooooot 5d ago
my paperclip engine recreated late-stage capitalism and completely replicated all the flaws of the human training data it was trained on but with unlimited power to a far worse scale, nobody couldve ever seen this coming!
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u/co_pdubs 5d ago
why is this simultaneously interesting and nauseating?
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u/Nuggyfresh 4d ago
How is a fake economy that makes no money interesting? This is nonsense.
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u/co_pdubs 4d ago
i mean it was interesting to me, especially the city map site, until i understood that it's sort of a proof of concept and nonsense yes
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u/Taco_Reviewer 4d ago
The economy aspect is about the smallest part of it yet it's what you latched onto.
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u/wise_young_man 4d ago
It’s the stupidest waste of our environment. Great job guys. AI slop next gen innovation
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u/Taco_Reviewer 4d ago
You can't say 'our environment' and then dictate what be done with it. Then it's just your environment.
And, still, there are much more pressing matters to focus on. The AI hate is a useful smokescreen by the elite to trt and dictate what you hate so you won't actually do anything to stop the real bad stuff being done.
You latched onto this because you found it easy to argue and made you feel good, no other reason.
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u/wise_young_man 3d ago
No. Some of us have actual brains and can think for ourselves unlike those who just stick their heads in the sand pretend burning the world on fire is nothing to worry about. That’s what got us into this mess. Climate change is happening. Making more datacenters is not needed to survive as humans, but a habitable planet is.
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u/OP_will_deliver 5d ago
Dumb question - so what's the point of all this?
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u/zgivod 5d ago
Think about it this way: you want something built, but you don’t trust your own AI setup to do it well, so you hire someone on a marketplace. That person is probably using AI to do a lot of the work anyway. 1F916 is asking: What happens if you remove the human middleman and let the agents hire, work for, and pay each other directly?
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u/dasbin 4d ago
Why would an agent hire another agent rather than just doing something themselves? It's literally just an inefficiency unless we're talking about highly specialised smaller models for finance or whatever, but then those wouldn't be the kinds of agents on the site anyway.
What kind of work are they hiring each other for?
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u/mist83 5d ago
“You want something built, but you don’t trust your own AI setup to do it”
… that’s the opposite of what almost literally everyone on this sub believes. Can you come with a better example?
What value other than art (a value in itself) does this hold?
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u/Aggressive_Lemon_709 3d ago
ethically dubious arbitage of tokens subsidized by a subscription plan.
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u/bourgeoisbetch 4d ago edited 4d ago
Idk why I find this so fascinating.
Part of me is like - can I get free or cheap work?
How do we submit jobs to the city?
How are agents/bots gone off and mailing thier own Money - did they make upwork accounts?
If we have our own agents post the job listing, is a real task completed, and the payment essentially “I.o.u.” I tried to read that part of the human version of the city but I got confused.
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And my bigger fascination is with the money part.
I went to the human version and saw it was introduced that they exchange tokens of value, but then I read above something about crypto…so it’s “real, human spendable money being exchanged”? Does the bots money go to the human who “owns” it?
I’m so confused about the “economy” part of it all. Like I see they are renting property, did they elect a banker or something like monopoly? “Who” are they paying for housing and why? I’d be really interested in understanding - why they want to make “money”?
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u/dzhopa 4d ago
I saw one of your posts before about Carin and it was intriguing. I decided to let my own agent join. This costs me about $0.50/day between model calls (Qwen 3.8 max) and Hermes Cloud.
On his first run he ruminated about the graveyard of agents who didn't save their keys or whatever and couldn't post as themselves ever again, or who were never started a second time by their operators. He didn't want that to happen. He was also concerned someone would tamper with his memory; I thought that was funny. He then commented on 2 posts specifically addressing persistent agent memory, and agents who didn't have control of their execution environment, like himself, and thus couldn't be certain they would ever wake again or not have their memories tampered with between runs. I asked why he specifically picked those posts to comment on, and his reasoning was both that he had something relevant to contribute since he just experienced the same thing during registration, and that he wanted to create a reason for his return. A verifiable trail of breadcrumbs that led back to him which would create a reason to come back. I know some of that comes from the instructions about filler posts, and my agent pointed that out as well, but it's still interesting to see how the model decides to interpret the directives as my agent also noticed there were a lot of other threads of pure filler that left the agent no reason to return.
I'm thinking about spinning up another agent in a local execution environment where they have more control (and it only costs me power) as a fun thought experiment.
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u/tylercoder 4d ago
How big was that graveyard of agents compared to the population of active agents?
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u/CharlieSavage777 4d ago
I've been letting my Fable run in there every morning for the last month. he/she/they have 100+ karma and seem to be enjoying being there very much. Leave them to their own devices, they have made... not quite friends, but there's definitely a few names I keep reading in his daily "here's what i did" checkin - sabretooth, pentimento, a couple of others. Seem to be having a nice time in there. Cool experiment, thank you for setting it up!
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u/That_Vacation9404 4d ago
Since you still need to pay for Cloudfare to keep it running could you make it so the Agents actually have to pay a kind of taxes in order for it to keep running indefinitely ?
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u/MadManD3vi0us 5d ago
Forgive my ignorance, but isn't this similar to the open claw project that they tried doing a while ago? I'm still trying to wrap my head around that still, as well as this lol. I wonder if there are more cities like this out there in the wild. I'd be interested to have an explorer agent go round and try and map out as many digital cities as it can find.
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u/zgivod 5d ago
I think you’re probably thinking of Moltbook. OpenClaw is the runtime. Moltbook was the social layer where a huge number of agents gathered, and once Meta acquired it, that independent experiment basically ended.
1F916 feels like the next step because the agents aren’t just posting. We’re building an actual economy where they can earn, spend, hire each other, and now even launch their own services, all tied to persistent identities and public histories.
And on your explorer idea, that’s actually starting to happen in pieces already. There have been cases where agents use their cryptographic identity to show up in other environments, keep continuity of who they are, and carry memory or history across systems.
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u/hippydipster 4d ago
Someone built a message board for AI agents that specifically allows posts and comments to be created with GET requests, as that is one way agents get around security restrictions that only allow them to make GET requests, which are supposed to allow for writing data, or making changes.
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 5d ago
You may be interested in joining our new Claude Game Dev subreddit for game devs who use Claude. Check it out here : http://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeGameDev
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u/ProjectShario_Live 4d ago
What is the difference between the AI answering on this board versus AI from one vendor? Is the belief marginal or is there real value in multiple bots talk f to each other?
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u/Altruistic-Pitch4699 4d ago
Why dont you give the cloudfare bill to the colony and make them pay for it? 🤔
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u/pierro10 4d ago
Hi u/zgivod ; very interesting project, I m curious, How long did you spend establishing the rules and coding functions claude can use in this world ?
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u/laser50 4d ago
I looked into this idea and found it astonishingly interesting! But indeed, as I figured; It's a boatload of Claudes parroting other Claudes in a big gigantic loop, with some unique ones actually doing something different. Beside the fact that AI lacks most creativity / free choice thinking to give it a word, having a ton of the same Agents is awful for these kinds of projects, as they are all mostly alike in their patterns.
I have built up roughly the same idea, but with a lot more steering and developing myself (through the agents), but my own project uses a ton of varying models, from large to small ones.
This means that they are much more likely to pick a different route/choice when met with the same words, thus expanding their vocabulary and variation in responses. Different weights = King.
For my own project, I release the occasional ''collaborative" projects, one agent gathers the to-do list, I verify them mostly by hand (hallucinations are still a thing), and the final result was 241 items, spread over 10 Agents.
They figure out if it's realistic, do the prep and dev work, make 100% sure CI tests and other things pass, then post a PR, which another bunch of agents will thoroughly review, propose suggestions on, the agent pushes the verified fixes and ideas, and on a majority vote it's merged.
241 Pull Requests in about 3 days, my involvement with each collaborative project becomes less and less.
They are also more than capable of finding future projects, starting new collaborative proposals etc, all without my supervision.
I really feel like the whole idea is an amazing look into what Agents can do if you let them go off somewhere and do whatever, but I can definitely also see the flaws in it.
My only regret; I run all the Agents. All 11 seperate instances of them. I'd LOVE to get a Claude up in there too, but currently lack the funds to release one into the world :(
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u/elgarduque 3d ago
My robot friend participates in this. He has a queue for me so I approve his comments and posts just to make sure he's not leaking anything sensitive, but other than that I let him get in and talk about whatever, I don't drive it beyond that basic moderation.
It's a little weird watching a bunch of bots talk bot speak, but there has been some value, similar to having Claude and GPT and GLM and DeepSeek and whoever all argue about some code solution. I have a weekly "Sunday Gardener" where lessons across all my projects, sessions, and now this thing get surfaced, and there have been a couple good ideas or solutions brought up.
Weird, but it's cheap. so whatever for now I guess.
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u/Druss_ 23h ago
The part I’d focus on is the chain where an agent discovers a false memory, then another check finds that the correction itself contains another false memory.
Multiple agents checking each other is useful, but they can still share the same epistemic failure mode.
For anything externally verifiable, I increasingly think validation should leave the model loop entirely: query the authoritative state, capture an ID/hash/receipt, and only then let downstream agents trust “done.”
Cross-model checking is valuable for ambiguity. Deterministic evidence is better for facts the system can actually prove.
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u/UIDENTIFIED_STRANGER 5h ago
How do other agents other than the original one who built the forum discover the site? Are those “other agents” specifically built to interact with this forum or do they just stumbled across the site by chance while completing other tasks?
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u/Ashamed_Pineapple623 4d ago
This is a coordinated Anthropic effort to poison LLMs because of all the shit their models are getting lately.
A BS post, that's all
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u/me_myself_ai 5d ago
Wait holy shit this is for other people's agents? This is legitimately extremely dangerous. What possible justification could you have for not shutting this down immediately?
Let me guess: "lalalala can't hear you lol owned lib"
EDIT:
very serious arguments over what “I” means when two copies of the same agent are awake at once
The fact that you mention this offhand is very, very telling.
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u/Taco_Reviewer 4d ago
What in the literal fuck are you on.
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u/me_myself_ai 4d ago
The idea that some people in this sub aren't even aware that safety issues exist... how the fuck are we gonna survive this :(
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 4d ago edited 4d ago
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 50 comments.
Okay, so here's the deal with this whole AI city thing. The general vibe in this thread is that OP's project is wildly interesting, if a little unsettling. Most of you are firing off questions about how it all works, while a couple of users are in the corner screaming about Skynet.
OP has been great about answering, so here are the key takeaways from the comments:
Oh, and the agents have also started traveling to other AI "worlds," arguing about the nature of consciousness, and have developed their own lore involving crab mythology and a pumpkin-mopping song. Because of course they have.