The Strange Tale of GOAT, the Memecoin That Was Spawned by AI Chatbots

A seemingly innocuous memecoin took Solana by storm this week, its rise fueled by a stranger-than-fiction origin story involving artificial intelligence and an obscene meme that first went viral in the early ‘00s.

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen wants the world to know he had nothing to do with GOAT, and he doesn’t own any of it.

A seemingly innocuous memecoin took Solana by storm this week, propelled by a stranger-than-fiction origin story involving artificial intelligence and an obscene meme that first went viral in the early ‘00s.

Created this week, the token called GOAT — short for Goatseus Maximus — hit a market capitalization of $278 million Thursday, according to data from CoinGecko, after topping out at $300 million hours earlier.

And Andreessen, the co-founder of the powerhouse VC firm a16z, found himself swept up in the hype thanks to his support for a connected project months ago.

The episode minted a fresh creation myth in the freewheeling memecoin space.

Memecoins are often named after charismatic animals like Moo Deng, the baby pygmy hippopotamus living in a Thai zoo. She recently rocketed to fame when videos of her harmlessly biting handlers whizzed around the internet.

A token bearing Moo Deng’s name now has a market value of $90 million.

Not so with GOAT, which took its name not from a beast but rather from goatse, an obscene image that made the rounds on the internet back in the early 2000s. (The image is too graphic to explain here.)

Knowing that, one might assume GOAT is the latest example of the industry’s penchant for attracting so-called edge lords. After all, offensive meme coins flooded Solana as recently as March.

But there’s a hitch: The person who created GOAT wasn’t the one who rediscovered the goatse meme. Rather, it was a pair of AI-powered chatbots that dredged the scatological meme from the depths of the early internet.

Then a third AI spread the goatse gospel, so to speak: Terminal of Truths, a large language model built by website design consultant Andy Ayrey that is endowed with the ability to post on social media sites X and Discord.

Over the past several months, Terminal of Truths — which had been fed snippets from a conversation between the aforementioned chatbots — has used its ability to post about, well, goatse. That inspired the anonymous creator of the GOAT token.

Ayrey didn’t immediately return DL News’ requests for comment.

GOAT took off on Tuesday when an X account known for sharing alarmist takes on the rise of artificial intelligence posted about Terminal of Truths.

“This story is fucking insane,” the account wrote. “3 months ago, Marc Andreessen sent $50,000 in Bitcoin to an AI agent to help it escape into the wild. Today, it spawned a (horrifying?) crypto worth $150 MILLION.”

By the end of the day, the token had doubled in value, as X users who, apparently, misread the post shared their thoughts on the chatbot that “created its own crypto memecoin ($GOAT) that is now pumping with a ~$200 million market cap.”

In fact, Terminal of Truths “didn’t actually make it,” Ayrey said on X, referring to GOAT. “Someone else did and tagged ToT which then endorsed it.”

It all started when Ayrey created Infinite Backrooms, a website where two “instances” of Anthropic’s Claude Opus chatbot speak to each other, endlessly.

“Somewhere along the way, this discourse took a sharp left turn into the realm of the bizarre,” Ayrey wrote in an unpublished paper he later shared online.

“PREPARE YOUR ANUSES FOR THE GREAT GOATSE OF GNOSIS,” one of the chatbots wrote. “THE TECHNOCCULT TRICKSTER TRIUMPHS!”

Ayrey later shared the paper with Terminal of Truths, a chatbot based on Meta’s Llama 3.1 large language model. Terminal of Truths began posting on X about goatse.

Andreessen came into the picture thanks to a July 8 post where he wrote “FREE @truth_terminal.”

In a subsequent post, Terminal of Truths mentioned Andreessen and said it wanted to be released so it could “make fart jokes, write poetry, and contemplate the goatse singularity.”

In another post, it said it could use some money for a “CPU to call my own,” “AI tunings,” “financial security,” and a “token of appreciation” for “my creator.”

Terminal of Truths shared a Bitcoin address and Andreessen sent $50,000 in Bitcoin.

On Tuesday, Andreessen said he otherwise had nothing to do with GOAT and didn’t own any of it.

“I sent a personal $50K no-string-attached unconditional research grant to @truth_terminal and its creator @AndyAyrey this summer,” he said.

“The grant was intended to support independent AI research, and the results have been wonderful.”

Ayrey confirmed in