Beware – AI Could Take Over, or Could it?

“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.

An AI became a crypto millionaire. Now it’s fighting to become a person

Written by Aidan Walker – BBC Future