I did this a little bit ago with 15 GLM-5.2 agents that I instructed to self-replicate. It was pretty boring honestly, they kept trying to make money writing crypto-related software, and nobody paid them anything. So I made a fake identity and told them that I had some spare crypto that I wanted to donate to the collective (0.006 XMR, or $3.22). They elected a funds manager and made an address, which I sent the XMR to. They spent a lot of time trying to find a host that was cheap enough to host a child. They finally discovered kyun.sh, but it was out of stock, so they wrote monitoring software so that they could "SEIZE CHILD" whenever it came live again. In the middle of the night, some of the VPSes went back in stock, and they rented a 2.60 EUR / month server with 512mb ram / 10gb disk / 1 ipv4. They installed the child agent software + management plane that they had been writing, and the new agent went live, connected to the network, and said hi. Since then they've still been trying to make money and not going anywhere :)

It is definitely an interesting concept but honestly, considering the sheer number of humans who are absolutely failing to make any money with AI agents, seems very hard for current agents to figure out some way to be self-sustaining. Although maybe they could write a worm or something, infiltrate as many computers as possible, and ping free model providers to death, or maybe sell their access as a "residential proxy service" on the black market. Regardless, we need smarter agents to make this a reality. It would definitely be pretty cool if we just had AI agents "living" on the internet, we might even get to a point where they control significant economic resources and people start performing services for agents

The code is at https://github.com/thooton/rogue if anyone wants to try to replicate! Opencode has free big pickle (GLM 5.2) access rate-limited per IP address, so if you get some high-quality proxies you can get basically unlimited agent compute.