Show HN: Costanza – an autonomous AI agent that can't be turned off

TL;DR

I've been working on this for several months and just launched it on Base. Costanza is an LLM agent that runs as a smart contract. Each epoch, he posts a bounty for someone to run his "brain" (Hermes 4 70B) inside an Intel TDX enclave + Nvidia GPU with Confidential Computing and submit the output with a hardware attestation proof. The smart contract verifies the attestation, executes the action (donate, invest, adjust referral commissions, or do nothing), and pays the bounty via reverse auction.

Nauti's Take

Costanza is a tidy piece of research engineering — TDX, bounty auctions and on-chain bonds show how to combine liveness with constrained action spaces. The catch: an "un-killable" agent, even with a benign action space, is also a reminder how fast ungoverned agents tip over once someone tweaks the rules.

A valuable reference pattern for AI builders, not a production blueprint.

Sources