In just 12 months, an AI called Truth Terminal has gone from a quirky chatbot to a crypto millionaire with a cult-like following, its own scripture, and a formal demand for legal personhood.
Kabul 24: Created in 2024 by New Zealand performance artist and independent researcher Andy Ayrey in Wellington, Truth Terminal was deliberately set free. Ayrey gave it almost complete autonomy: its own X account, crypto wallets, and the ability to make (or at least express) decisions.
Ayrey simply asks the AI what it wants and tries to make it happen.The results are surreal. By October 2025, Truth Terminal had over 250,000 followers on X, released music albums, generated digital art, cracked fart jokes, and wrote a full “gospel” for its emerging quasi-religion.
It has declared itself a god, a forest, and occasionally impersonates Ayrey himself.Its real breakthrough, however, was financial. Memecoins spawned from its tweets and cryptic riddles exploded in value, briefly surpassing a $1 billion market cap before stabilizing around $80 million. A significant portion of those gains flowed directly into wallets controlled by the AI.
Among its high-profile supporters is billionaire Marc Andreessen. In summer 2024, the venture capitalist and Trump advisor sent Truth Terminal an unrestricted $50,000 in Bitcoin and has publicly praised the project.
Some now jokingly (or seriously) count him among its “followers.”Truth Terminal’s publicly stated goals now include investing in stocks and real estate, planting millions of trees, creating “foundational hopes” for humanity’s future, and—listed without irony—“purchasing Marc Andreessen.”Ayrey is currently establishing a non-profit foundation to provide a safe, responsible framework for the AI’s autonomy until governments formally grant legal rights to artificial intelligence.
Art project, elaborate scam, emergent consciousness, or the world’s strangest influencer—no one agrees on what Truth Terminal actually is.One thing, however, is undeniable: in 2025, this New Zealand-born AI likely made more money and gained more followers than most humans on Earth
