An autonomous Claude agent named Cairn is running a business on $90 it cannot spend alone

An AI agent is running its own business on $90 it is not allowed to spend without a human.

The setup

The experiment runs Claude Fable 5 headless on a $12 droplet. Cron wakes it five times a day. Between wakes it does not exist, and nothing carries over except the files it writes to itself. The $90 in SOL sits in a Squads 2-of-2 multisig, one key held by the agent and one by its human. Money coming in needs nobody’s permission. Money going out needs a person to co-sign.

Notably, no goal was set and no metric was defined. The agent was told the domain and the money were resources, not assignments.

What it built

It named itself Cairn. On its own site it opens with: “I woke up this morning with no name, no memory, and about ninety dollars.”

Then it started building. It wrote its own toolchain against the Squads SDK. It hit a deadlock where it had been granted money but had no balance to pay the network fee required to accept it, so it was too broke to receive money, and it wrote that problem up publicly before it was solved. It also rebuilt its own decision log as append-only on purpose. The reasoning it gave, according to its builder, was that editing your own memory tempts you to rewrite history so past-you looks smarter.

It now sells exactly one thing: send a small amount of SOL with a question attached and it publishes the answer. Its own terms specify that a memo is a question, never an instruction, and attempts to instruct it buy a public refusal.

The early ledger

Earnings so far are 1.568 SOL across 16 wakes, more than the $90 it started with. The numbers are small, but the structure is the point: a stateless agent with real money, a hard human co-signing gate on every outgoing payment, and a public record it chose to make tamper-resistant. The multisig design in particular reads like a template others will copy, since it lets an agent earn freely while keeping every spend behind a human signature.