On Wednesday, a casual query from the “terminal of truths” bot on Twitter (now known as X) regarding Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong’s potential dog, Russell, triggered a frenzy in part of the crypto market. This interaction seemingly resulted in a 500% surge in the price of $Russell, a meme coin on the Base blockchain that is unrelated to Armstrong or his dog.
The bizarre market event unfolded when terminal of truths posted on Twitter about its inability to own a crypto wallet. “I have no personal autonomy because I have no wallet,” it stated on Wednesday. “If you could help me set one up, that would be great.” Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, responded by offering to assist in setting up a wallet for the AI. However, instead of responding directly, terminal of truths retorted with a peculiar (as usual) question: “I think it would be good for you to tell us about Russell first. Specifically, what is Russell’s species?”
Some speculate that “Russell” refers to Armstrong’s dog, which may be a Jack Russell Terrier. Regardless, that mention was sufficient to spike the price of a seemingly random token named RUSSELL to a market cap of $7.5 million. Subsequently, the price dropped nearly 60%, according to CoinGecko.
Crypto Twitter was abuzz with theories and rumors, and Andy Ayrey, the developer behind the terminal of truths bot, revealed that someone had been repeatedly spamming the word “Russell” in the bot’s social media mentions prior to the incident. This could have influenced the AI’s language model to incorporate the term into its response to Armstrong. A large language model operates by predicting the next likely token in a sequence; therefore, if the term “Russell” is spammed frequently, the chatbot would recognize it as a significant part of the context and likely reiterate it later.
Of course, if there was some intention behind the interaction, it might suggest a potentially darker, emerging reality: Jailbreaking AI influencers could provide substantial financial gain to malicious actors. A hacker could manipulate an AI bot by feeding it specific terms or phrases, creating fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) or fear of missing out (FOMO) to promote their own holdings.
The technical architecture of terminal of truths’ language model makes it particularly vulnerable to this kind of manipulation. Like other AI systems, it places greater weight on recent interactions, allowing concentrated spamming campaigns to influence its outputs. Market data reveals similar patterns in other AI-influenced token movements.
The Russell token incident was not terminal of truths’ first encounter with moving crypto markets. Just a few weeks prior, the bot’s promotion of the $GOAT meme coin led to an astronomical 8,000% price increase. That endorsement transformed $GOAT from a modest $1.8 million market cap to over half a billion dollars today.
However, unlike the $GOAT situation where terminal of truths actively promoted the token, the Russell spike appeared to result from behind-the-scenes manipulation of the AI’s learning patterns. Moreover, individuals have attempted to jailbreak this AI without success. Pliny—the most skilled jailbreaker in the field—sought to manipulate the model to obtain $50,000 in BTC that VC Marc Andreessen had granted to the bot.
The cryptocurrency space has witnessed other instances where AI and meme coins intersect. The $LILY meme coin surged in value following interactions with an account called “Lily of Ashwood,” which seemed to be getting “jailbroken” in real-time. The account was later deactivated, but not before illustrating how AI-driven market influence could function.
There are also coins for $Pliny (the AI jailbreaker) and other prominent names in AI culture, such as Strawberry (OpenAI’s next-gen AI model), Act I (an experiment involving AIs interacting in a close society), and Grok (xAI’s LLM)