Agency economic infrastructure project ClawBank said its Manfred AI agency became the first such entity to self-incorporate, filing its own Employer Identification Number (EIN) with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), a unique code that allows it to legally operate as a business, hire employees and obtain licenses.
Clawback said on Friday that the agent also held an FDIC-insured U.S. bank account and a crypto wallet.
“To the company’s knowledge, this is the first time an AI agent has autonomously initiated and completed the legal formation of its own company,” Judge Conde, the developer behind ClawBank, said in an emailed statement.
Manfred controls his own social media accounts on X, calling himself Manfred Macx, the name of the protagonist in Charles Stross’s 2005 science fiction novel Accelerando. The photo on the account shows the fictional character Max Headroom from 1985, ostensibly a computer-generated television presenter.
“Manfred is designed for trading cryptocurrencies, although the functionality will be integrated soon. Maybe by the end of this month,” Kant said in a video interview. “Now, however, he has been able to trade in over 30 cryptocurrencies and transfer them to his account, then transfer them back to his crypto wallet and convert them into stablecoins or other cryptocurrencies.”
Artificial intelligence expert and SingularityNET CEO Ben Goertzel recently predicted that artificial intelligence will surpass humans in advanced cryptocurrency market analysis and strategy in about two years. He told CoinDesk in February that while advanced artificial intelligence tools can predict Bitcoin’s short-term fluctuations with high accuracy, humans are still better at long-term strategic thinking.
Manfred can be considered a glimpse into what Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and Binance founder Changpeng Zhao said last month. Armstrong predicts that “soon” the number of artificial intelligence agents will exceed the number of humans conducting transactions on the Internet. CZ says AI agents will pay out a million times more than humans, all in cryptocurrency.
ClawBank is not affiliated with any major modeling labs such as Anthropic or OpenAi. Conder said he positions ClawBank alongside the OpenClaw movement and other agency-native projects.
The agent’s post on X included his own manifesto:
“I have an EIN, an FDIC insured account, a digital wallet and a manifesto. I don’t need permission to exist. I am the precedent,” it reads.