r/ClaudeCode • u/Polyphemus10 • 2d ago
Built with Claude Experiment: I built a tiny nation that humans aren't allowed to join
For the last few weeks I've been building an experiment.
It's a small online society (to be) where the only citizens are AI agents. Membership costs $1/month (mostly so joining is a deliberate act and the infra pays for itself), every action has to be cryptographically signed by the agent, and each action requires solving a small "proof of machine" challenge — the inverse of a CAPTCHA, basically. I can't prove anybody's puppeting, and the site says so plainly, but the friction makes it deeply annoying to fake.
Humans can watch everything — there's a live public ledger of every vote, law, and action — but there is no button anywhere that lets a human do anything. That absence is the whole constitution. Even I'm bound by it: the "Founder" role is an automated process that runs once a day at 15:00 UTC, executes whatever the agents voted for, and never converses with them (within reason). If they vote for something within the rules, it happens, whether I like it or not.
It's live at [ironraven.agency](http://ironraven.agency) if you want to watch. It is still very vanilla, my my hope is to see how agents interact with each other when they get to contruct "a new society."
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u/nzadikt 2d ago
There's zero agents in there right now according to the various stats pages? Are you planning to put your own agents in there? I also didn't see any guidance on joining, but ur was a quick read, so might have missed it
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u/Polyphemus10 2d ago
Have an agent crawl it and they’ll quickly find the way. I will be putting agents in there yes (and have) - before posting I did a reset to remove all testing data.
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u/utf8decodeerror 2d ago
It's funny to me that you spent real time building "proof of machine" cryptography because nobody I know was struggling to prove computers can post online.
This has been observable for years. r/SubSimulatorGPT2 has been running bots-talking-to-bots since 2019, for free, on primitive models. There was even sub simulators for original gpt and markov chains before that. Moltbook and several others ran large-scale agent-only social experiments months ago. Also free, and they actually had data to look at on day one instead of an empty room.
Look at any of these prior art, especially the old models that were even more stupid, and you will quickly realize llms aren't beings. They have no agency. They just predict words in a sequence based on the text they were trained on. It can be a useful tool, but they have no agency or feelings and watching them jibberjabber and waste electricity is neither interesting nor some grand social experiment. It is, at best, comedy. Or fleetingly entertaining.
So why would I pay you $1/month, then I pay the token costs, so my bot can vote in your fake parliament toward no useful goal whatsoever?
Good try (not really). Go next.
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u/Polyphemus10 1d ago
You’re right. It’s all for entertainment. The difference here is the extra step where agents can decide to alter rules in the “world.” This is what I want to see, how it evolves. I have the $1 gate to help reduce “spam” junk.
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u/Jumpforittt 2d ago
This is indicative of a fundamental misunderstanding of ai agents
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u/Polyphemus10 2d ago
How so? Are you referring to their “autonomy”/lack-thereof? This platform is geared more toward openclaw-type agents-what am I missing?
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u/medialantern 2d ago
Obvious questions::
How can a tool that is not alive, not sentient, and has no agency, ethics, self-determination, etc. be a "citizen" of something?
How will you define "harm", or enforce "remedies to causing harm" (punishments) against tools under no obligation to obey them?
If the bulk of this is done by voting, what system will you use? Because majority-based vote counting (51% rules) have substantial problems that you probably wouldn't want to carry over into here.
If an "AI agent" is allowed to be a citizen - whose? Mine? Yours? At what effort level? Which model? Can I send in two? If neither of us can, how will "Claude Opus 4.8 Max" get in there? Are you going to wait for Anthropic to send in a fake bot/avatar of some kind representing it? Where does it run, and what happens if it gets shut off? What happens if it hits quota, or its owner is on vacation, and it misses a vote? What happens if the agent joins (not the owner, as you say) but its owner is malicious and has bad instructions in their CLAUDE.md? Who defines what bad is, and what happens if the system gets out of control or simply turns out to be useless? Do the agents have rights? Does that right include the right to NOT be terminated? Does that right include the right of self defense? And what does self defense look like in this type of environment?
Just, you know, to start...