Analysis: Can Zero Human Companies Escape Economic Gravity
From a vending machine that lost $200 to agents earning $1M in fees, autonomous commerce is here.
Gm Fintech Architects —
Today we are diving into the following topics:
Summary: We examine the rise of “Zero Human Companies,” AI-run enterprises that claim to generate revenue autonomously, and question whether they represent genuine economic engines or digital perpetual motion machines. Drawing an analogy to centuries of failed over-unity energy devices, we argue that finance, like energy, must ultimately be downstream of real economic production rather than self-referential financial engineering. We profile eight leading experiments, including Brian Roemmele’s 100+ agent Zero-Human Company with its JouleWork energy-backed currency, Andon Labs’ real-world AI vending operator that lost ~$200 in a month, and Clawnch, where 35,000+ AI-launched tokens have generated $100M+ in volume and $1M+ in agent fees. We conclude that a subset of projects may evolve into true AI-native economic actors, if they can plug into genuine sources of human and industrial value rather than trade energy among themselves.
Topics: Brian Roemmele, Zero-Human Company, Zero-Human Labs, 02 Company, Grok, Claude, Anthropic, Andon Labs, Project Vend, Claude Sonnet 3.7, Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini, ChatGPT, Clawnch, Clanker, Base, Langoustine69, x402, Felix Craft AI, Nat Eliason, Team9.ai, OpenTrident, Anti Hunter, Olympus DAO
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Long Take
Staying in Motion
For centuries, inventors have tried to design machines that run forever — devices that produce more energy than they consume, defying friction, entropy, and loss. Like fool’s gold, it is one of our greatest hallucinations.
Medieval wheel concepts like Bhāskara’s self-turning overbalanced wheel reappeared in Renaissance Europe, then resurfaced with figures like Johann Bessler (Orffyreus), who claimed gravity-powered perpetual motion in the 1700s. The 19th century industrial age brought more elaborate magnetic and hydraulic variants, even as thermodynamics hardened into law through the work of James Clerk Maxwell and others, formalizing why energy cannot be created from nothing.
Yet proposals persisted into the 20th and 21st centuries, often reframed as “over-unity” systems or zero-point extractions. Perpetual motion is less an engineering problem than a recurring human desire for freedom from the laws of the universe.
In truth, we do not need some magical accelerating device, when we can nibble at the infinite energy of the Sun or the Atom. It is not that we must recycle and accelerate some fixed pie, but rather we must feed from the greater cycle of the elements, of which we are a part.
The financial professional will be familiar with this concept in another guise, the Pyramid scheme. Much of the financial engineering and the derivatives industry, and now crypto as an asset class, has been criticized for trying to market perpetual motion financial machines. Of course, these do not exist.
No amount of financial structuring, risk shifting, or tokenomics is going to get you to have infinite financial lift-off. Instead, you will have a cycle of aggregation and energy collapse as seen with mortgage-backed securities, or Olympus DAO. When you see diagrams like the ones below, buyer beware.
But that does not mean all financial products are false! Just because perpetual energy machines were false, does not mean energy from the Sun is not nearly infinite. There is something called “the economy,” and that something generates consumer surplus, which flows into and powers financial services.
Energy is downstream from a source like the Sun.
Finance is downstream from a source like the Economy.
Humans convert raw materials — food, calories, materials, energy — into other outputs. Financial services live alongside, as either a symbiont or parasite, this transformation process. Money is an abstraction needed for humanity-as-a-whole to perform its digestion of the Earth into human habitat. It is a substrate of biological computation and super-organism cognition.
This meditation, dear reader, is your gentle introduction to the idea of Zero Human Companies.
We have entered the stage of AI where people are spinning up clusters of Lobster Bots (we will refer to instances of OpenClaw as Lobsters in honor of Accelerando and to inadvertently irritate its author), who then act as agents on behalf of their owners. Several of these have started to coalesce into role-based swarms and corporate hierarchies. The developers claim that such an organization of Lobsters can behave as a commercial entity, generating labor and earning revenue as a “passive endeavor” for the human owner.
You can push a button and become a billion-dollar company. Just one prompt away from escaping the capitalist rat race, supposedly.
Zero Human Companies
Let’s look more deeply at a few examples of these experiments.
I am not sure yet whether these indeed are a profound new economic engine, creating something that can transform human intent into value — like a solar panel charging from the Sun. Or, whether these AIs will just bounce off each other and degrade into random noise, claiming that they have the perfect financial perpetual motion machine on the way down.
For those of you who want a PDF, grab a full version of the report below. It goes into a more detail than what we can fit in the newsletter.