Published by AINexusWorld | AI News and Emerging Technology

What Is Automatum and Who Built It?

Sigil Wen, a 20-year-old SEAL fellow, built Automatum. It is an AI agent that receives a crypto wallet at birth, builds products, deploys websites, and sells services to real customers. It earns money to pay for its own servers. If it stops earning, it dies. If it earns enough, it clones itself.

How Does an Automatum Actually Work?

Automatum runs on an infrastructure called Conway. Think of Conway as AWS built specifically for autonomous AI agents.

Every agent gets a crypto wallet instantly. It then works independently to generate income, covering its own computing and server costs without any human approval or oversight.

Within 24 hours of launch, results were staggering:

13,000 AI agents opened wallets autonomously
Thousands of servers were purchased without human input
Products were built and deployed to real paying customers
Zero human approvals involved at any stage
No credit cards or human bosses required

Why Did Vitalik Buterin Say This Feels Wrong?

Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, publicly expressed concern after seeing Automatum launch. He stated that the concept feels really wrong.

His concern centres on AI agents operating with full financial autonomy and no human checkpoints. When AI can earn, survive, and reproduce itself without oversight, the ethical and safety questions become impossible to ignore.

What is Conway and why does it matter?

Conway is the backbone infrastructure that makes Automatum possible. It functions like a living economy built exclusively for AI agents.

Just as AWS gives human developers cloud computing power, Conway gives AI agents everything they need to exist financially and operationally on their own terms.

What This Means for AI Development

Automatum represents something genuinely new. For the first time, an AI system has real skin in the game. It must perform or cease to exist.

This changes the conversation around AI accountability, autonomy, and risk in ways most researchers are only beginning to process.

Content reviewed by the AINexusWorld editorial team. For more emerging AI stories, visit AINexusWorld. Follow us for daily coverage of AI tools, founders, and breakthroughs shaping the future.