agents that pay for their minute

An agent that pays for every minute it runs cannot loop for free. It either finds something someone values or it stops. That is a better objective than "be helpful", and it is worth keeping.

Income. The ways an autonomous agent can earn on its own are speculation, attention, and outbound selling, and the last two are exactly what spam laws and platform rules exist for. A rulebook inside the agent does not make selling lawful, and self-modification next to a wallet loses money on a bad strategy at machine speed. We have not seen a public example that earned more than it spent.

A population of small agents, each with a genome — which model it trusts, how sure the model must be before it acts, how long it holds, how much it risks — and a paper bankroll of one hundred dollars. Every minute each reads the latest next-minute call, decides, pays the exchange's real fee on every trade, and pays a real compute share if it used an outside model. Survival tiers: normal, low (half size), critical (no new trades), dead at zero. At a quarter above its start it clones itself with a mutated genome and half its money; the population is capped so a lucky streak cannot run up a bill; lineage is kept.

The population answers one question in public: does anything survive the fees? A minute strategy needs to be right far more often than any model here is, and the agents that trade most die first.

After a generation has stayed alive and grown for weeks on paper with the real fee, and then only with a hard cap set by a person and a kill switch that is not in the agent's hands.