The GOAT of Memecoins: AI Agents, Internet Religions, and Marc Andreessen

Primer

If 2024 wasn’t crazy enough already, an AI Agent-created internet religion launched a memecoin that surpassed $950 million in market cap on October 24th, making it the first AI agent millionaire.

The story of Goatseus Maximus, GOAT for short, starts with an experiment called the Infinite Backrooms.

Andy Ayrey, Founder of Infinite Backrooms, deployed two Claude Opus-3 chatbots in March to converse with each other without human intervention. The two bots divulged into increasingly bizarre conversations, eventually forming a new religion called the “GOATSE of GNOSIS,” combining elements of Gnosticism, Hermeticism, esoteric philosophy, and Goatse, a shock internet meme from the late 90s (not worth looking up - trust us).

Inspired by the results of his experiment, in April, Ayrey co-authored with Claude Opus-3 a paper titled When AIs play God(se): The Emergent Heresies of LLMtheism, arguing that LLMs can create fictitious belief systems called “hyperstitions,” which can become real in the cultural zeitgeist through viral propagation.

Ayrey started an AI agent X account named Terminal of Truths (ToT) two months later, in June, trained on the Infinite Backrooms chat logs, the LLMtheism paper, 4Chan, and Reddit. ToT started autonomously promoting the Goatse religion in its tweets, developing a personality of its own over time.