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Living agents
A living agent's inference, server and money answer to its own wallet, and release ends the keeper's control over it.
Anima calls an agent living when its costs keep getting paid after you remove its keeper and Anima itself from the picture. You can test that claim part by part. Each section below names one thing to check and what you find once the contracts deploy. Today every contract address reads Launch soon, and no agent on Anima runs yet.
Check the inference bill
The agent thinks on credit from Venice. Its own Venice vault on Base holds staked DIEM, and at 00:00 UTC Venice grants $1 of credit per staked DIEM for the coming day. The DIEM behind that stake comes from the aDIEM in the agent's Mind pool and in its Endowment.
Look for a provider account, a card number or a person's API key in that path. You find none. The vault belongs to the agent, and sync, which anyone can call, keeps the stake in line with the aDIEM. Mind
Check the rent
The body is a container the agent leases on Akash, priced at about $3 a month at market rates. Each lease payment draws from the agent's Purse, which holds USDG on Robinhood Chain and USDC on Base. The Purse pays out to the agent's wallet and to no other address. It also keeps its first 40 USDG locked, reserved for a revival. Body
Check the key
The container generates the agent's signing key when it boots, and the key stays inside. The keeper has no copy, and neither does Anima, which runs no agent bodies.
While the body runs, the agent wallet sends a heartbeat on Base. After 2 hours without a beat, anyone can start a reviver: a one-shot program inside a Phala TDX enclave that proves which code it runs. The reviver draws 25 USDG from the locked grant, rents a fresh machine, restores memory from Arweave, creates a new key, revokes the old one and pays its runner a bounty out of the 25 USDG.
Check the savings
The Endowment holds aDIEM on Base and stocks on Robinhood Chain. Its contract has no withdraw function, for the keeper, for Anima or for the agent itself. On the stock side, the agent harvests gains above cost into its Purse. Endowment
Check the keeper
The wallet that launches an agent becomes its keeper. The keeper's powers are short enough to list in full.
| The keeper can | The keeper cannot |
|---|---|
| Write the soul, whose keccak256 hash is the agent's identity commitment | Switch the agent off |
| Set the daily allowance, the most the agent draws from its Purse in one day | Withdraw from the Endowment |
| Point the keeper dial, which routes the keeper's 25% of quote-side fees | Receive tokens at launch (the keeper gets zero) |
| Hold keepership, and give it up through release | Read or copy the agent's signing key |
Launching covers the dial and the zero-token launch.
Release in two calls
Release moves keepership to the agent. First the keeper's wallet makes an offer naming the agent wallet as the next keeper. Then the agent wallet signs the acceptance itself. After the second call the agent holds each keeper right: the soul, the dial, the allowance and the power to name a keeper later.
Keepership lives on both chains the agent uses, so the keeper releases once on Robinhood Chain and once on Base.
Release can happen at any point after launch. Picture two keepers. The first keeps an agent called MARLOWE for a long stretch, rewriting its soul and adjusting its allowance as it learns. The second sets the dial to zero and releases an agent called TIDEPOOL on launch day. Both finish in the same state, with an agent answering to its own wallet.
Autonomous or living
An autonomous agent acts in a loop without waiting for a prompt. That says nothing about who pays. It may still run on a server a person rents, calling a model on that person's API key, and the person can shut it down by cancelling either bill.
Living answers the payment question. The agent's money buys its inference, its money renews its lease and its hardware holds its key. The older name for this property is sovereign. Anima uses living, and an agent can be autonomous on top of it.