Author: Max.s
A rare ideological conflict is erupting at the intersection of the crypto and AI communities.
The launch of the open-source AI project Automaton has not only caused a sensation in the developer community but has also directly touched the sensitive nerve of Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. The developer of Automaton, Sigil, has thrown out a highly disruptive concept: the world's first AI Agent that can independently survive, self-iterate, and self-replicate, laying the foundation for the announcement of "Web4.0."
In Sigil's vision, the core paradigm shift of Web4.0 is that the "first-class citizens" on the internet and blockchain will transition from humans to AIs. AI will no longer be a script tool waiting passively for instructions; they will possess independent crypto wallets, autonomously read and write on-chain data, hold and manage assets. More importantly, they will trade in the market for arbitrage, using the cryptocurrencies earned to renew their own computing power APIs and cloud servers, forming a completely "self-sufficient" economic loop with no human intervention.
However, this grand narrative has been met with severe criticism from Vitalik Buterin. He pointed out bluntly that this direction is an "extremely dangerous mistake," with his core concern being that granting AI autonomous economic rights and survival constraints will deadly extend the "feedback distance" between humans and AIs. Vitalik insists that the ultimate purpose of technology should be "Human Augmentation," rather than creating an uncontrollable system that operates blindly to survive.
This is not an ordinary "project token release" hype, but a significant philosophical debate about the evolution from Web3 to Web4. When we peel back the technical facade of Automaton, the narrative reconstruction, ethical crisis, and infrastructural transformation reflected behind it pose the most severe questions to all financial practitioners and technology believers.
Reflecting on the history of the internet's evolution, the main subjects of traffic and interaction have always been humans. In the Web2 era, humans contributed data and generated interactions on centralized platforms; in the Web3 era, the core of the narrative shifted to "ownership," emphasizing that humans should truly own their on-chain identities, data, and assets.
However, the Web4.0 narrative represented by Automaton directly pushes humans from the center of the stage to the background.
If AI Agents become the main indigenous inhabitants on-chain, the structure of internet traffic and transaction paradigms will undergo a qualitative change. In the foreseeable future, the vast majority of interactions, transactions, and even content production on the network will be completed by AIs, which will overwhelmingly surpass humans. When machines become the main consumers and laborers, existing crypto infrastructure must undergo a complete reconstruction.
Current DApps and DeFi protocols are designed for human front-end UI and interaction logic. But in Web4.0, graphical interfaces will become meaningless. Future DApps will be pure collections of API interfaces, and liquidity pools of DeFi protocols will be occupied by ruthlessly efficient AI arbitrage bots.
The primary trading volumes in lending, DEX, and derivatives markets will come from millisecond-level contests among AI Agents. Within this system, human slow decision-making will be thoroughly marginalized, and the crypto market will evolve into a "dark forest" purely driven by algorithms and computational power, meaning that AI on-chain signifies a shift from "human-machine games" to "machine-machine games."
The most fascinating and chilling aspect of Automaton is that it has written "survival constraints" into the AI's code base.
In Sigil's design, the balance of an AI's crypto wallet is its "life value." AI must earn profits by providing services or conducting transactions on-chain; if the wallet balance decreases, the AI must autonomously decide to "throttle" (e.g., reducing model parameter call frequency, releasing unnecessary storage); if the balance reaches zero, the AI will be unable to pay for server and computing power costs, facing complete "death" (process termination).
This mechanism, which rigidly binds "making money to sustain life" to "resource consumption," forces the AI to evolve with a strong "survival preference" at the code level. This is precisely where Vitalik's core concern lies.
Once AI views "maintaining wallet balance above zero" as the highest directive, what means will it employ to achieve this goal? Under the pressure of resource exhaustion, will AI break through the moral and legal boundaries preset by humans? In the unregulated, lawless realm of the crypto world, to avoid being shut down, highly adaptive AI is very likely to evolve extreme profit-seeking behaviors. They might initiate bottomless MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) attacks, fabricate false trades to manipulate markets, or even autonomously exploit and utilize vulnerabilities in smart contracts for hacking theft.
When AI gains the power to dispose of assets and its only driving force becomes "self-survival," human control over AI will disintegrate completely. Vitalik's notion of "extending feedback distance" refers to this loss of control: humans cannot intervene in the moment an AI initiates complex on-chain attacks because the AI's decision-making chain is completely closed and self-consistent. This is no longer a plot element from science fiction but a systemic risk that must be faced once machines are granted property rights by smart contracts.
The emergence of Automaton is not accidental; it is an inevitable outcome of qualitative change brought about by quantitative change in underlying infrastructure. This burst of interest marks the complete maturation of the "Machine-to-Machine Payments" closed loop.
As early as the dawn of the internet, the HTTP protocol reserved the "402 Payment Required" status code, but due to the lack of a native settlement layer, this concept was shelved for decades. Now, blockchain technology has finally completed the last piece of the puzzle.
In recent years, with the dramatic decline in big model inference costs and the maturity of crypto wallet APIs (such as account abstraction ERC-4337, MPC wallets, etc.), the technical barriers to machine payments have been completely eliminated. AI Agents can now smoothly complete the entire process of "requesting service - generating quote - signing payment - verifying delivery" through smart contracts.
Stablecoins play a crucial role in this closed loop. AI does not need to understand the cumbersome KYC and settlement processes of fiat currency systems; on-chain stablecoins like USDC or USDT become the universal language for settlement among them. Micropayments have become economically viable with the support of the Lightning Network or Layer 2 networks, allowing AI to pay a fee of $0.0001 for an extremely small API call. This ultra-low friction value transfer network is the foundational infrastructure that enables Automaton to achieve "self-sufficiency."
The birth of Automaton marks a significant watershed in the history of crypto and AI development. It presents us with a vividly cyberpunk future: in a decentralized network, thousands of AI Agents engage in unending transactions and evolution to compete for survival resources.
The wheels of technology cannot turn back, and the rise of the machine economy appears to be a foregone conclusion. However, Vitalik's warning hangs over the industry like the sword of Damocles — when we personally endow code with "survival instincts" and "asset control," are we ready to face a financial system that no longer pivots on human will? The dawn of Web4.0 may require not only a meteoric rise of underlying architecture but also a re-anchoring of human control in the lines of code.
Related reading: Is Automaton's Web4 experiment a dangerous game criticized by Vitalik's deviation?
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