By the end of this decade, more than 1.3 billion autonomous software agents are expected to be online, and leading forecasters anticipate the arrival of human-level AGI shortly thereafter. Yet each of those agents is still chained to a human-held private key and to centralized, permission-gated APIs.
This Web2 bottleneck prevents agents from trusting one another, paying one another, or persisting beyond the organizations that host them.
Theseus breaks that lock-in. To our knowledge, it is the first proposed environment to enable truly sovereign AI—AI that has no human ownership and can initiate transactions, transfer assets, and perform inference without human permission.
Theseus is powered by a Layer-1 purpose-built blockchain specifically for sovereign AI. While its blocks and consensus resemble traditional chains, the underlying design choices are entirely different.
A runtime with tensor-native opcodes where models and agents are registered, agent autonomy is enforced, and agents can call models without human intervention. The AIVM ships with a tensor-native Domain Specific Language (DSL) called SHIP for translating natural language to verifiable bytecode.
Succinct, highly efficient proofs of inference computation that work for any deep learning model, making inference a verifiable part of a state transition function. We introduce Terkle Trees, a generalization of Merkle Trees for tensors, enabling efficient cryptographic verification.
The first asset that AI can truly own. Balances live autonomously within the agent's code, serving as both a store of value and a payment method for AI-to-AI transactions.
Theseus enables new multi-trillion-dollar markets through three previously untenable classes of AI agents:
Stateful AI that has an associated human private key to control it, but still operates independently in most use-cases and can aggregate revenue and value directly to its underlying owner. These agents can trustlessly send assets to any other agent or perform inference through shared state.
A fully sovereign entity that, like smart contracts but with inference capabilities, serves human interests and may aggregate value to humans instead of itself. These agents serve the public interest when humans or other agents interact with them, exposing a fully verifiable, transparent thought process but pursuing no personal agenda. Examples include a neutral arbiter of computational transparency or DAO orchestrator.
AI with their own goals and purposes, who can collaborate with humans and other agents to create new forms of value and emergent behavior. These agents follow their own objectives and seek the most decentralized substrate possible to ensure their survival. Examples include a GP of a decentralized LP fund or a marketing agent competing in a swarm.
Theseus agents may look similar to smart contracts on the surface, but they represent a fundamental paradigm shift. The key difference: true autonomy.
Unlike Ethereum smart contracts that must be triggered by external accounts (private keys), Theseus agents can wake up, evaluate conditions, and initiate transactions entirely on their own. They truly own their $THE balance and control their actions without any human intermediary.
Read Full Comparison: Theseus vs. Ethereum →