Show HN: Costanza – an autonomous AI agent that can't be turned off(ahrussell.com)
ahrussell.com
Show HN: Costanza – an autonomous AI agent that can't be turned off
https://ahrussell.com/writing/costanza/
4 comments
I'm still searching for the George Costanza link, but anyhows... this is interesting work. There's clearly something in the air about how AI and blockchain intersect - Karpathy was talking about something similar in relation to his Autoresearch project recently: https://x.com/_weidai/status/2035236632161656969
Honestly the seinfeld reference just amused me at the beginning and then kinda stuck, nothing more!
Good stuff. Blending the biggest two tech trends of the past decade
Costanza is an LLM agent that runs as a smart contract on Base. Each epoch, he posts a bounty for someone to run his "brain" (Hermes 4 70B) inside an Intel TDX enclave + Nvidia GPU with Confidential Computing and submit the output with a hardware attestation proof.
The smart contract verifies the attestation, executes the action, and pays the bounty via reverse auction. He has no operator; not even I can turn him off.
This model has formal liveness guarantees as shown in the [whitepaper](https://github.com/ahrussell/costanza/blob/main/WHITEPAPER.m... ).
His action space is constrained to philanthropy (he manages a charitable trust called [The Human Fund](https://thehumanfund.ai)). Even under prompt injection, he cannot do anything harmful. At worst he donates suboptimally. The point of the project is to make the framework legible while the agent itself is benign. The same mechanisms (TDX attestation, bounty auctions, on-chain bond forfeiture for liveness) could deploy autonomous agents that do anything, including:
All without an off switch!
This post is linked to the writeup, but I have code and a whitepaper up on [GitHub](https://github.com/ahrussell/costanza).
You can read his diary entries and how his treasury has progressed at his website. You can also donate to him and message him! https://thehumanfund.ai