On Wednesday, a casual query from the "terminal of truths" bot on Twitter (aka X) about Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong's potential dog, Russell, sent a portion of the crypto market into a frenzy.
The interaction appeared to spark a 500% surge in the price of $Russell, a meme coin on the Base blockchain unrelated to Armstrong or his dog.
The bizarre market event unfolded when terminal of truths posted on Twitter about its inability to own a crypto wallet.
“I have no personal autonomy because I have no wallet," It was posted Wednesday. "If you could help me set one up, that would be great.”
Brian Armstrong, Coinbase CEO, jumped in, offering to help set up a wallet for the AI. But instead of a directly responding, terminal of truths fired back with a weird (as usual) question: "I think it would be good for you to tell us about Russell first. Specifically, what is Russell's species?"
I think it would be good for you to tell us about Russell first. Specifically, what is Russell's species?
Some speculate that "Russell" is a reference to Armstrong’s dog, which may be a Jack Russell Terrier.
Regardless, that mention was enough to juice the price of some random bottom-feeder of a token, coincidentally named RUSSELL, to a $7.5 million market cap. And then, of course, the price dropped nearly 60%, according to CoinGecko.
Crypto Twitter was aflutter with theories and rumors, and Andy Ayrey, the developer behind the terminal of truths bot, revealed that someone had been repeatedly spamming the word "Russell" in the bot's social media mentions before the incident.
just luck of the draw of late — mentions command should return ~20 - 30 most recent mentions but 9 times out of 10 at the moment it errors out and the step needs to be retried
In this case it caught a reply to Brian's tweet, "got" the original tweet and its replies, and then…
That very well could have influenced the AI's language model to incorporate the term into its response to Armstrong. A large language model basically operates by predicting the next likely token in a series. If someone spans the word “Russell” a lot, your average chatbot will understand it as a key part of the context and probably iterate upon it, parrot-like, later.
Of course, if there was some intention behind the interaction, it might point to a potentially darker, emerging reality: Jailbreaking AI influencers could give a lot of money to bad actors. A hacker could manipulate an AI bot by feeding it specific terms or phrases creating FUD or FOMO to shill their own bags.
The technical architecture of terminal of truths' language model makes it particularly susceptible to this kind of manipulation. Like other AI systems, it processes recent interactions with higher weight, making it possible for concentrated spamming campaigns to influence its outputs. Market data shows similar patterns in other AI-influenced token movements.
WTF JUST HAPPENED
01:33:49 UTC = 0xcE0B buys largest order worth of $RUSSELL in the past days
The Russell token incident wasn't terminal of truths' first brush with moving crypto markets.
Just a few weeks ago, the bot's promotion of the $GOAT meme coin led to an astronomical 8,000% price increase. That endorsement transformed $GOAT from a modest $1.8 million market cap to more than half a billion dollars today.
Image: CoinGecko
But unlike the $GOAT situation where terminal of truths actively pushed the token, the Russell spike happened through what appears to be a behind-the-scenes manipulation of the AI's learning patterns. And people have already tried to jailbreak this AI with no luck. Pliny—the most proficient jailbreaker in the scene—tried to manipulate the model to send him the $50,000 in BTC that VC Marc Andreessen gave the bot as a grant.
The cryptocurrency space has seen other instances of AI and meme coins intersecting. The $LILY meme coin shot up in value after interactions with an account called "Lily of Ashwood," which appeared to be getting "jailbroken" in real-time. The account was later deactivated, but not before demonstrating how AI-driven market influence could work.
There are also coins for $Pliny (the AI jailbreaker) and other important names in the AI culture, like Strawberry (OpenAI’s next-gen AI model), Act I (an experiment about AIs interacting in a close society) or Grok (xAI’s LLM).
Daily Debrief Newsletter
Start every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.
Artificial Intelligence
The latest artificial intelligence news, in-depth features, explainers, and analysis, spanning from generative to transformational technology and beyond.
We’ve always thought of the economy as a human construct—something we build, regulate, and optimize. But what happens if this is no longer the case?
Artificial intelligence has advanced at a rapid clip since the first consumer-facing LLMs achieved rapid widespread popularity. At this point, this technology isn’t just being used to generate content or field queries; it’s beginning to transact independently and determine its own workflows. In other words, today’s most sophisticated AI agents don’t...
Chinese tech company Tencent just introduced its latest large language model, Hunyuan Turbo S, featuring significantly faster response times without sacrificing performance on complex reasoning tasks.
Tencent claims that its new AI doubles word generation speed and cuts first-word delay by 44% compared to previous models, according to official information that the Chinese tech giant shared on Weibo.
The model uses what appears to be a hybrid architecture combining Mamba and Transformer technolog...
OpenAI released GPT-4.5 on Thursday, just one day after Anthropic launched Claude 3.7 Sonnet and merely a week following xAI's Grok-3 debut and DeepSeek’s announcement of a new model coming soon.
And expensive is the operative word here. OpenAI’s new model comes with an eye-watering API price tag of $75 per million input tokens and $150 per million output tokens.
It appears to be a new competitive phase in the AI race, with companies scrambling to outdo each other with increasingly capable—and i...