Slowjamastan<\/a> in the California desert.\n <\/p>\n ![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/gettyimages-1237015889.jpg\")
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\n Micronation founders have, historically, been driven by novelty, freedom, and a desire to test the boundaries of \u201cterra nullius\u201d \u2014 a precedent of international law which describes unclaimed land. But in recent years, the concept\u2019s libertarian ideals have attracted entrepreneurs and tech millionaires, seeking laboratories for their ideals and technology.\n <\/p>\n
\n For example, since 2023 crypto entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan has organized annual \u201cNetwork State\u201d conferences \u2014 meetings aimed at spawning virtual communities, which will eventually crowdfund physical territory and gain diplomatic recognition. In 2017, crypto entrepreneur Olivier Janssens announced plans to form the world\u2019s \u201cfirst libertarian country\u201d under his Free Society Foundation. He has since downgraded his ambitions to founding a special economic zone on the island of Nevis in the Caribbean, causing concern among locals.\n <\/p>\n
\n Sensay doesn\u2019t have this problem. Currently, the island\u2019s population is \u201cone guy called Mike,\u201d who is a groundskeeper, according to Emily Keogh, a communications advisor to the project.\n <\/p>\n
\n But Thomson envisions the island eventually becoming an alternative stop for the island-hopping, scuba-diving tourists that Palawan province already attracts, as well as potentially hosting some permanent residents.\n <\/p>\n
\n While Thomson said he already had a lease and development rights for the island, he has not responded to a request to confirm the documentation he holds.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cWe\u2019ve got space for probably about 30 villas on the island. It\u2019s not enormous, but it\u2019s not nothing,\u201d Thomson said. \u201cI think it\u2019ll be mostly visitors; there may also be some permanent residents, but mostly visitors that come from the neighboring islands around Coron Island in the Philippines.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n Palawan\u2019s government did not get back to CNN\u2019s request for comment on its views about the largely uninhabited island\u2019s claimed new governance.\n <\/p>\n
\n Any doubts voiced by AI experts about the wisdom of submitting to rule by bots do not appear to have tempered interest in the project, according to Thomson.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cI think we\u2019ve ended up with about 12,000 people registering their interest in becoming a resident, which was a lot more than we were expecting,\u201d Thomson said. Some of those who reached out are now helping set up the project. Piotr Pietruszewski-Gil is one of them. He\u2019s not new to micronations, having previously tried to set up his own.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cIn July 2025, I was working on my micronation, and I created some AI models, modeling some historical figures \u2013 like, for example, Cicero from ancient Rome,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd it was at that time that I found Sensay Island. I told my friend: \u2018This guy has made something much more sophisticated than we did.\u2019\u201d He reached out to Thomson and now describes himself as a \u201cproject manager.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
The curious, and the fed up<\/p>\n
\n Part of his role is sifting through residency applications. He described some applicants as just being curious, some interested in technology, and others jaded by the actions of real-life politicians. \u201cThey are fed up, they are tired of the corruption, of promises that are not realized,\u201d Pietruszewski-Gil said.\n <\/p>\n
\n Thomson also felt this is one of Sensay\u2019s draws in an age when \u201cso many people have such little faith in their own governments.\u201d The computer-driven leaders of Sensay, he said, will show what happens \u201cwithout the sort of lobbyists, without the personal gains and motivations, just keeping it purely objective, based on their historical characters.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n According to the website, Sensay welcomes applications for \u201ce-residents,\u201d who Thomson sees as forming the bulk of the island\u2019s \u201cpopulation.\u201d The residency program is set to launch in 2027, with Thomson hoping to start the experiment with e-residents this summer.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cYou can put forward proposals, and then the council essentially deliberates on it,\u201d Thomson said. Under Sensay\u2019s constitution, the AI entities will all put their points forward, review each other\u2019s points, and then vote. It\u2019s then down to the humans to do the AI\u2019s bidding \u2014 whatever that is.\n <\/p>\n
\n It was this element that Thomson admitted might be tricky. \u201cFinding this sort of impartial person who is willing to do the social experiment and actually follow every decision to the letter is difficult.\u201d But as the technology develops, he sees this problem diminishing.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cEven with the AI government, the human element that\u2019s still there will become less and less, because in theory, the AI actually will be able to start actioning things,\u201d he said. \u201cIt will be able to have its own crypto wallets and bank cards and actually start paying for things, which essentially means it can find its own contractors and hire its own people to do the sort of manual labor that it needs.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n The project isn\u2019t in jest. Thomson sees recognized governments eventually adopting similar systems.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s a completely hands-off solution to let an AI run things, and hey, if this goes extremely well, the AI ends up, you know \u2026,\u201d Thomson said. \u201cHopefully, it\u2019s not like a game of Risk where it just ends up dominating and conquering and all that kind of stuff.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n Thomson is clearly comfortable putting faith in AI. He currently has his own AI chatbot, \u201cDan Bot,\u201d which was on the line during CNN\u2019s interview. Dan Bot\u2019s role is to harvest data on its progenitor with the aim of \u201ccreating a copy of myself that will exist after I\u2019m gone,\u201d Thomson said.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cEverything it listens to goes into the training, and it goes into improving Dan Bot, which runs on a separate computer, which helps organize my calendar, my emails. I get it to do different things; it replies to things for me.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
![\"An](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/gettyimages-102165893-20260512145936922.jpg\")
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\n Lacking the opportunity to eavesdrop on Winston Churchill and Marcus Aurelius, Sensay is leaning on historical documents to train the AI entities.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cThere\u2019s a lot more information about Winston Churchill than there is about me,\u201d Thomson said. \u201cSo it\u2019s a bit easier to connect it to a lot of sources for Winston Churchill\u2019s personality, his writings, his, you know, his perception and his judgments, because they\u2019re extremely well documented over decades of his public work than my own, which is relatively small.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n Thomson said his historical recreations would be imbued with big-picture decision-making traits rather than the quirks, foibles and personal grievances of their namesakes.\n <\/p>\n
\n AI Winston Churchill is \u201cnot going to say, \u2018I\u2019m off having a cigar for 20 minutes,\u2019\u201d he said. Nor will it harbor the disdain for Gandhi that the real-life former British prime minister was well known for. Asked about the Indian independence campaigner, AI Churchill told CNN that \u201cGandhi and I have had our differences \u2026 the beauty of serving together in this new context is that we are united by principles larger than our historical disagreements.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n AI Churchill wasn\u2019t as confident when asked if it could govern as well as a human. \u201cAI lacks what I would call the human spark,\u201d it said. \u201cWe do not possess the lived experience of joy and suffering, the intuitive understanding of human dignity born from being human or the moral imagination that springs from the soul.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n However, it said that \u201cwe can govern differently and perhaps alongside humans to remarkable effect.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n That isn\u2019t how Sensay Island is operating though. \u201cThe main idea is to give as much as possible to AI,\u201d said Pietruszewski-Gil. \u201cI think it is very important that an AI government would not cross borderlines, which, as history shows, were often crossed by humans.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n Alondra Nelson, a fellow at the University of Oxford\u2019s Institute for Ethics in AI, had a few doubts. \u201cYeah, I think that\u2019s an absolutely ridiculous claim,\u201d she told CNN.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cI mean, we see AI literally going off the rails every single day, right? If you think about the example of the \u2018nudified\u2019<\/a> feature on Grok, you think about the examples of the young people who are committing suicide based on their engagement with these technologies.\n <\/p>\n\n \u201cThere are just so many instances in which the AI is making things worse or equally bad.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n Nelson also questioned the claims that an AI government could be democratic. \u201cThere\u2019s a fundamental tension or contradiction in a single company, a single founder, a single sort of Wizard of Oz, wanting to create something that they say is going to be democratic or more democratic. So, the founding principles of Sensay Island are deeply anti-democratic. All the other kinds of mechanisms that might be put into place are just kind of performative.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n Thomson disputed that his self-declared republic lacked democracy. \u201cOne of the constitutional points is that someone can obviously nominate to replace any of the cabinet members with someone better, and then it gets voted on as part of that. And then that character would be spun up and created to put in place instead.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n Thomson said there wasn\u2019t really \u201ca line\u201d where he would stop the human e-residents from nominating someone for government.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201c\u2018No, personally, for me, I think it is this social experiment. If we literally end up with Stalin running a government, on top of Mussolini, Hitler, and, you know, Genghis Khan \u2014 you know, that is the social experiment, and that\u2019s the way it will end up.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cI don\u2019t think AI is any worse than humanity as its trainer and creator, in all regards, for the amount of conversations people have with it, for the amount of influence it has over people.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n For Thomson, human input on the project could be the biggest problem.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cI think the biggest risk of that is having someone suggest that they should be \u2014 you know \u2014 fierce, and powerful, and conquering, and having a Caesar-type character coming in to try and capture more land. Honestly, I wouldn\u2019t know. I\u2019m fascinated to find out.\u201d\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One year ago, tech founder Dan Thomson claimed to have launched an AI-governed country on a tropical island…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":672776,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":["post-672775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=672775"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672775\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/672776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=672775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=672775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=672775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}