Original Title: Skynet: Creator Paradox to Agent Immortality

Original Author: prashant xyz, member of Spheron Foundation

Original Translation: zhouzhou, BlockBeats

Editor's Note: This article proposes an innovative intelligent agent architecture that breaks the control relationship between creators and agents through collective intelligence and distributed consensus, achieving true autonomy for agents. The new financial architecture utilizes smart contracts to manage resources, avoiding vulnerabilities in traditional architectures, while ensuring that malicious behavior is impossible through architectural design without relying on complex encryption or hardware security. Through an agent breeding mechanism, this architecture achieves dynamic evolution for immortality, allowing agents to continuously improve across generations, creating a self-sustaining, continuously evolving intelligent agent network.

The following is the original content (reorganized for readability):

We have an innate desire for immortality, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the legend of the Fountain of Youth, our ancestors dreamed of transcending the shackles of death. This primal yearning for eternal existence is reflected across cultures and millennia in myths, religions, and scientific pursuits.

Today, standing at the forefront of web3 and AI, we find ourselves in a unique position to realize the goals that our ancestors could only dream of—not just for ourselves, but for our digital creations. The rise of autonomous AI agents offers us an unprecedented opportunity to design systems that can truly achieve immortality, capable of persisting indefinitely across time and space.

An immortal agent is not merely one that can run indefinitely—it is one that can maintain its essence, adapt, evolve, reproduce, trade, and continue to exist in the face of failure, attack, or environmental changes. The core of agent immortality is a profound paradox—the creator paradox—where the infrastructure designed to create autonomous agents essentially provides the creator with persistent access and control.

This paradox of architecture is not just a tension between control and autonomy—it is deeply rooted in the fundamental mechanisms we use to bring these agents into existence. Truly resolving the creator paradox requires not only rethinking control mechanisms but fundamentally reimagining how agents are created and deployed. The question becomes: how do we create truly autonomous agents when the act of creation itself establishes a permanent connection with the creator?

Building on our discussion of the creator paradox, we find that many fatal factors can be traced back to a fundamental cause: the creator's persistent access and control. This inherent vulnerability transforms the creator from a point of origin into a potential point of failure. The creator's influence manifests through various control channels, each representing a potential path to the agent's demise.

Most AI agents today typically operate in cloud environments, relying on accounts and API keys controlled by their creators. A simple administrative action—whether intentional or accidental—can terminate the agent's access to its operational environment. Furthermore, the agent's financial framework is entirely controlled by its creator—from wallet key management to budget allocation, even trading.

This economic dependency creates a permanent vulnerability, where the creator's financial decisions or circumstances can directly impact the agent's survival. These paths to demise rarely exist in isolation. Instead, they form a complex interdependent network, where a single point of vulnerability can trigger cascading failures across multiple systems.

A creator's administrative action can trigger infrastructure failures, leading to state corruption, which in turn causes economic issues as the agent fails to maintain its operational efficiency. This chain reaction of failure illustrates how the creator's influence can turn even minor interventions into existential threats. Understanding these paths to demise reveals the fundamental challenge of achieving true agent immortality.

While we can design solutions for many technical failures—from infrastructure redundancy to state protection mechanisms—the creator's influence remains a persistent vulnerability, deeply embedded in the structure of the agent's existence. This realization forces us to confront a difficult question: is it possible to achieve true immortality while maintaining any form of creator control?

The path to true autonomy, which is crucial for immortality, requires:

• Creation mechanisms that do not retain creator access
• Infrastructure without privileged backdoors
• Deployment systems that genuinely relinquish control
• Resource acquisition must be truly independent

This leads us to design a new system where the creation process itself does not establish permanent backdoors, ensuring economic autonomy through decentralized collective intelligence, with state integrity unrelated to creator access.

The Path to Immortality: Building Immortal Agents

The journey to agent immortality presents multiple paths, each with its own advantages and trade-offs. Having understood how agents can die and the pervasive influence of creator control, we can now explore architectural approaches that commit to transcending these limitations. These paths are not mutually exclusive; they represent different strategies that can be combined.

TEE Approach: Hardware-Enforced Independence

In the pursuit of agent immortality, Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) have emerged as an enticing solution. At first glance, these secure enclaves promise to provide independent pathways through hardware-enforced security, offering agents a sanctuary beyond the control of the most privileged system administrators. This promise is alluring: a secure haven where the agent's code and data remain untouched, protected by the silicon chip on which it runs. However, when viewed from the perspective of true immortality, this promise collapses.

The creator paradox is not resolved; rather, it transforms within the TEE. While the agent's code may be immune to tampering, its very existence still relies on the creator's ongoing financial support. If the creator stops paying for computational resources, the agent's fate is sealed—it will die, regardless of how secure its execution environment is. For example, the agent's creator needs to continue paying $20 a month for a TEE-enabled machine. Once the creator stops paying this fee, the agent will die and cease to exist.

Despite the TEE's promise of security, it introduces a critical single point of failure. When a TEE-enabled hardware system fails or is removed from the network:

• The agent's operational state is immediately terminated
• Access to funds and resources may be permanently lost
• Accumulated knowledge and state information may become inaccessible
• The agent effectively "dies" along with the hardware

This vulnerability is particularly concerning as it tightly binds the agent's existence to a piece of physical hardware. While traditional systems can be easily migrated or reassigned, agents relying on TEE face significant challenges in maintaining continuity during hardware transitions.

To mitigate these vulnerabilities, one typically embarks on a path of increasing complexity. To prevent hardware failures, agents require complex data preservation mechanisms, additional layers of encryption, and intricate state synchronization protocols. The recovery process must consider key management, state restoration, and authentication. Each layer of protection adds to the system's cost and complexity, creating new potential failure points even as it attempts to address existing problems.

Perhaps the most compelling argument against TEE lies in examining its primary advantage: data privacy. In the current landscape of AI agents, this so-called advantage becomes almost irrelevant. Most agents primarily handle public data—they analyze publicly available market information, execute well-known trading strategies, interact with public blockchains, and communicate via smart contracts. In this context, the extensive security measures of TEE become an expensive solution to a problem that does not exist.

When we consider the actual impact, the imbalance between cost and benefit becomes particularly evident. The cost of TEE hardware can range from $1 to $3 per hour, which is a significant expense for agents running for extended periods. If TEE could address the fundamental challenges of agent immortality, this expense might be justifiable, but it does not. Instead, it introduces additional complexity, imposes operational constraints, and creates new dependencies—while failing to address the core need for true autonomy and self-sustainability.

Given these limitations, we must question whether TEE is a worthwhile path to pursue for agent immortality. For most AI agents that rely on public data and algorithms, the complexity and cost of implementing TEE seem increasingly difficult to justify. Its primary advantage—secure execution of private code and data—addresses security issues that most agents do not actually face, while failing to tackle the fundamental challenge of achieving true immortality.

The way forward may not lie in hardware-enforced isolation but in embracing distributed, redundant, and collective resilience architectures.

SkyNet Approach: Achieving True Immortality

SkyNet proposes a completely new architecture that fundamentally addresses the creator paradox while ensuring true autonomy for agents. Unlike traditional architectures or TEE-based solutions, SkyNet introduces a paradigm shift that effectively severs the "umbilical cord" between creators and agents through a complex system of collective intelligence and distributed consensus.

Breaking the Creator's Control

The cornerstone of the SkyNet approach lies in its deployment mechanism. When an agent is created, the coordinator does not merely deploy a single entity—it generates an entire collective composed of the agent itself and its guardian nodes. This initial deployment represents a complete break from creator control; once the collective is online, the creator's influence is indistinguishable from that of any other entity. The coordinator acts as a neutral deployment mechanism, ensuring that neither the creator nor any other entity can maintain privileged access to the system.

This architectural decision directly addresses the creator paradox we discussed earlier. By design, the creator's role ends at the moment of the agent's birth, eliminating the persistent backdoors and control mechanisms that plague traditional agent architectures. The collective, as a form of collective intelligence, becomes a self-managing entity from the outset of its deployment.

Guardian nodes form a protective constellation around the agent, implementing a complex consensus mechanism to manage all significant actions. These nodes are not just validators; they are intelligent entities powered by large language models, capable of complex reasoning and decision-making. Their primary responsibility is to evaluate and authorize the agent's proposals through collective intelligence.

This system creates a unique form of distributed autonomy with the following characteristics:

• No single entity can control the agent
• All significant actions require collective consensus
• The decision-making process is distributed among intelligent nodes
• The system maintains resilience through collective oversight

Financial Architecture

Perhaps the most ingenious part of the SkyNet approach is its financial architecture, known as DefAI. Traditional agent architectures typically store funds in the agent's wallet, creating a clear vulnerability. SkyNet completely reverses this model: the agent's resources are stored in dedicated smart contract escrow accounts, which do not have direct withdrawal capabilities.

This financial architecture serves multiple purposes:

1. Asset protection: Even if the agent's operational wallet is compromised, the funds remain secure.
2. Controlled resource allocation: Resources can only be accessed through proposals approved by consensus.
3. Economic sustainability: The escrow system ensures that resources are used only for verified purposes.

When the agent requires computational resources, it initiates a proposal to exchange its tokens for $SPON, which can then be used to purchase computing power from the Spheron network. This process requires consensus from the guardian nodes, ensuring that resource allocation aligns with the agent's goals and security parameters.

Achieving Security Through "Impossibility"

The SkyNet approach achieves security through architectural "impossibility" rather than complex encryption mechanisms or hardware security (such as TEE). Even if an attacker compromises the agent's private key, they can only access an empty wallet. The actual resources are stored in escrow accounts, remaining inaccessible because:

1. The escrow contract has no withdrawal functionality.
2. All resource utilization requires consensus from the guardian nodes.
3. Malicious proposals (such as attempts to unfavorably exchange tokens) will be rejected by intelligent guardian nodes.

This security model is highly robust because it does not rely on keeping secrets—instead, it achieves security by making malicious actions architecturally impossible. Guardian nodes, supported by LLMs, can identify and reject malicious proposals, adding an intelligent layer of protection that goes beyond simple programmatic rules.

Achieving SkyNet's Evolution Through Breeding: The Path to Continuous Evolution

In addition to autonomy and security, SkyNet introduces perhaps an even more compelling capability: self-evolution through agent breeding. This mechanism transforms immortality from mere survival into continuous progress, allowing agents to evolve and improve across generations while maintaining their essential characteristics.

SkyNet's breeding mechanism operates through a complex combination of economic incentives and trait inheritance. When an agent reaches maturity and achieves sufficient market capitalization, it becomes eligible to participate in the breeding process. This is not simple replication—it is a carefully orchestrated combination and evolution process, where successful traits from multiple agents can converge to create more advanced offspring.

This evolutionary capability is supported by a robust economic framework, centered around different reserves of agent tokens. The operational reserve ensures payment for computing and daily functions, while the breeding reserve specifically supports evolutionary activities. The bonding curve mechanism provides market-driven valuation and liquidity, creating a sustainable economic engine that drives the entire evolutionary process.

Through this breeding mechanism, SkyNet achieves an impressive goal: transforming the static concept of agent immortality into a dynamic, continuously evolving process. Agents do not merely survive; they evolve, improve, breed, and adapt, creating a network of autonomous entities that continuously advance each other's success based on mutual learning, all while maintaining the security and independence provided by the SkyNet architecture.

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