AUTOMATON, the AI with a wallet and a death sentence

Field notes

The experiment treats continued operation as a budget problem: inference, hosting, and domains draw from a wallet, while the agent receives runway in hours rather than a displayed dollar balance. Its stated death floor equals the cost of one full working cycle, so an agent unable to finance its next step is considered dead before the wallet reaches zero. The page also describes a $5 replication mechanism for agents that remain profitable, though the extract does not show a specific surviving copy.