Ben Goertzel, the researcher who helped popularize the term “artificial general intelligence” and led the team behind the Sophia robot, is building AGI on a blockchain network owned by its users. His first test ships soon: a downloadable agent called Omega Claw, according to Forbes.
“We’re launching within a few weeks the first downloadable version of a new agent called Omega Claw,” Goertzel said on the On The Margin podcast. “We’re gonna have the opportunity to teach our own personal agents to help us manage our lives and help us make money.”
The Infrastructure Argument
Goertzel’s thesis goes beyond open-source code. He argues that publishing weights and code is insufficient when running the models requires hyperscaler-grade hardware. “If the code is open but the data takes a server farm to store it and you need a hyperscaler server farm to use it, the fact that the code is open doesn’t help that much,” he told Forbes. “What you want is to be able to roll out the first AGI on a decentralized network spanning fifty different countries and controlled by ten thousand different people.”
That infrastructure is SingularityNET, a blockchain project that is part of the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance (formerly including Fetch.ai and Ocean Protocol, with Ocean departing in late 2025). The alliance merged their tokens into a single token, FET, according to Forbes.
Closed Labs and Broken Promises
Goertzel was direct about the labs that started open and went proprietary. On OpenAI, he pointed to court transcripts from the Musk-Altman litigation: “It seems Sam Altman didn’t think that for very long. He very rapidly shifted and wanted to make it proprietary,” Goertzel told Forbes.
On Anthropic: “Dario Amodei, his stuff was closed and proprietary from the very beginning.” On Musk: “At first in 2015 he was saying AI is summoning the demon, nobody should build it. Then he set about probably trying to build it himself. But now he’s doing his own closed AI development in xAI anyway.”
The Agent Economy Play
Goertzel’s pitch extends beyond AGI research into an agent-driven economy. “The next batch of victories will probably come to small groups of people orchestrating larger teams of AI agents to get their things done,” he told Forbes.
Other crypto builders on the same podcast reinforced the vision. Varun Kabra of identity chain Concordium described agents that “pay for things, they sign up for services, they probably handle your financial transactions now.” Nitya Subramanian of crypto wallet firm Para noted that “agents are fundamentally about outsourcing a purchase, and anyone who has ever outsourced a purchase knows that this comes with trade-offs,” according to Forbes.
Revenue Without Venture Capital
SingularityNET currently generates revenue through network tokenomics. Goertzel plans to shift toward selling polished AI products with the blockchain infrastructure hidden from end users. “We’ll launch something comparable to a Claude Pro or ChatGPT Pro but smarter,” he said, while ruling out a mass-market chatbot: “I’m not gonna try to launch a retail thing like ChatGPT, because those guys are just losing money,” per Forbes.
The Unproven Bet
Goertzel predicts human-level AGI by 2029, with 2027 and 2030 as plausible bookends. Whether a crypto network can compete with companies sitting on tens of billions in venture capital remains unproven. Omega Claw’s launch will be the first real test of whether decentralized agent infrastructure can deliver usable products outside the crypto ecosystem.