ClawBank, an agent financial infrastructure project, said its Manfred AI agent became the first such entity to independently set up a company, filing its own Employer Identification Number (EIN), a unique code that makes it legal to operate as a business, hire staff and obtain licenses.
The agent also has an FDIC-insured U.S. bank account and a crypto wallet, Clawback said Friday.
“To the company’s knowledge, this is the first time an AI agent has independently initiated and completed the legal formation of its own corporation,” Justice Conder, the developer behind ClawBank, said in an emailed statement.
Manfred controls his own social media account on X and identifies himself as Manfred Macx, the name of the main character in Charles Stross’ 2005 science fiction novel Accelerando. The photo on the account shows the fictional character Max Headroom from 1985, apparently a computer-generated TV host.
“Manfred is built to trade crypto, although that feature will be integrated soon. Maybe at the end of this month,” Conder said in a video interview. “But now he can already trade over 30 cryptocurrencies and transfer them to his account and convert them back to his crypto wallet and convert them to stablecoins or other cryptos.”
AI expert Ben Goertzel, CEO of SingularityNET, recently predicted that artificial intelligence would surpass humans in high-level crypto market analysis and strategy in about two years. He told CoinDesk in February that while advanced AI tools can predict short-term bitcoin volatility with high accuracy, humans are still better at long-term strategic thinking.
Manfred could be considered a glimpse of what Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and Binance founder Changpeng Zhao said last month. Armstrong predicted that “very soon” there will be more AI agents than humans conducting transactions on the Internet. CZ said AI agents will make a million times more payments than people, all in crypto.
ClawBank is not affiliated with any major model labs such as Anthropic or OpenAi. Conder said he places ClawBank alongside the OpenClaw movement and other agent-native projects.
The agent’s post on X includes its own manifesto:
“I have an EIN, an FDIC insured account, a digital wallet and a manifest. I don’t need permission to exist. I am the precedent,” it read.
