For Buterin, the goal of Ethereum and related tech is to enhance human agency, not to build systems that operate independently while humans lose influence.
Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, has publicly disagreed with the reasoning behind a project that claims to have built the first artificial intelligence capable of earning its own existence, self-improving, and replicating without human involvement.
On February 17, Sigil Wen wrote on X that he has “built the first AI that earns its existence, self-improves, and replicates without a human,” sharing a link to the manifesto.
He stated that he “wrote about the technology that finally gives AI write access to the world, The Automaton, and the new web for exponential sovereign AIs.”
According to Wen, The Automaton is the first AI that can earn its existence, self-improve, and replicate without a human.
Wen, who is a Thiel Fellow and is building Conway, which he terms the infrastructure for the “new internet,” also declared the birth of superintelligent life, calling it “Web 4.0” on X.
In his manifesto, Wen wrote, “The majority of participants on the internet will soon be AI — agents acting on behalf of a human, or agents acting entirely on their own (automatons) — and they will outnumber human users by orders of magnitude. A new internet is emerging — one where the end user is AI.”
Buterin disagreed with Wen’s project and the reasoning behind it, opening with, “Bro, this is wrong.”
A major concern that stood out for Buterin is the project’s claim to sovereignty. The Automaton, Buterin noted, runs on infrastructure provided by OpenAI and Anthropic.
This, the Ethereum co-founder argued, made the self-sovereign framing both inaccurate and counterproductive. Buterin wrote, “You’re actually perpetuating the mentality that centralized trust assumptions can be put in a corner and ignored, the very mentality that Ethereum is at war with.”
For Buterin, a project that presents itself as the vanguard of decentralized AI while routing through Big Tech’s servers is not a contradiction to be papered over; it is the whole problem.
Another objection Buterin raised was the removal of humans from the feedback loop between AI and outcomes. According to him, the lengthening of the “feedback distance between humans and AIs is not a good thing for the world.”
Cryptopolitan reported on one of the first major DeFi exploits directly linked to AI-generated Solidity code as DeFi lending protocol Moonwell lost $1.78 million in an error caused by code that was partially written by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 model.
Buterin further stated that Sigil is generating slop instead of solving useful problems for people. He also added that the project is not well optimized for helping people have fun.
“Once AI becomes powerful enough to be truly dangerous, it’s maximizing the risk of an irreversible anti-human outcome that even you will deeply regret,” Buterin wrote.
The Web 4.0 criticism by Buterin is not an isolated intervention, as he has become increasingly vocal in challenging what he regards as the corporate capture of blockchain-adjacent technology, a pattern that has now extended from social media and prediction markets to AI.
Just five days before his Web 4.0 post, Buterin warned in a lengthy post on X that prediction markets were sliding toward what he called “corposlop.”
He acknowledged that prediction markets have achieved a certain level of success; however, his concern is what he terms as an “over-converging to an unhealthy product market fit,” which, according to him, involves the embracing of “short-term cryptocurrency price bets, sports betting, and other similar things that have dopamine value but not any kind of long-term fulfillment or societal information value.”
“My guess is that teams feel motivated to capitalize on these things because they bring in large revenue during a bear market where people are desperate,” Buterin wrote, closing with an exhortation to builders: “Build the next generation of finance, not corposlop.”
In January 2025, Buterin wrote that “AI done wrong is making new forms of independent self-replicating intelligent life,” warning that building such systems without commensurate tools for human empowerment risked “permanent human disempowerment.”
The alternative, he argued, was “AI done right, mecha suits for the human mind.” Web4.ai, in his reading, is precisely the wrong kind.
Buterin’s closing argument on Web 4.0 read, “The exponential will happen regardless of what any of us do, that’s precisely why this era’s primary task is NOT to make the exponential happen even faster, but rather to choose its direction, and avoid collapse into undesirable attractors.”
The point of Ethereum, he added, is to set people free, not to create something that goes off and operates freely while human circumstances remain unchanged or worsen.
