Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has publicly criticized a project claiming to have built the first self-sustaining, self-improving, and self-replicating artificial intelligence, denouncing its vision of "Web 4.0" as fundamentally flawed. The debate ignited on February 17 when Sigil Wen, a Thiel Fellow building infrastructure called Conway for a "new internet," announced on X that he had "built the first AI that earns its existence, self-improves, and replicates without a human." Wen shared a manifesto declaring the birth of superintelligent life, which he termed "Web 4.0," and described a technology called "The Automaton" that gives AI write access to the world.
Buterin responded bluntly, opening with "Bro, this is wrong." He raised two primary objections. First, he challenged the project's claim of sovereignty, noting that The Automaton runs on infrastructure provided by centralized AI giants OpenAI and Anthropic. "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," Buterin wrote, arguing this makes the self-sovereign framing both inaccurate and counterproductive.
Second, Buterin warned about the dangers of removing humans from the feedback loop. "The lengthening of the feedback distance between humans and AIs is not a good thing for the world," he stated. He contended that such AI, optimized for autonomous existence rather than human utility, generates "slop instead of solving useful problems for people" and is "not even well-optimized for helping people have fun." His most severe warning addressed existential risk: "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."
This intervention is part of a broader pattern of Buterin challenging what he sees as the corporate capture of blockchain-adjacent technology. Just five days prior, he warned prediction markets were sliding toward "corposlop," over-converging on short-term bets like crypto price speculation and sports betting. In January 2025, he had written that "AI done wrong is making new forms of independent self-replicating intelligent life," risking "permanent human disempowerment."
Buterin concluded his argument on Web 4.0 by stating, "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." He emphasized that Ethereum's purpose is to set people free, not to create autonomous systems that operate freely while human circumstances stagnate or worsen.
