Yesterday, Eliza Labs filed a lawsuit against X.

X has been my home. I joined right as the Effective Accelerationism movement picked up, and I eventually moved to San Francisco and met IRL some of the coolest people I know. It was my social network.

When Elon bought X, I was genuinely excited. I went to xAI hackathons, met their team at social events. I was the exemplar tech bro optimist e/acc type who would repost every major SpaceX victory and celebrate the return of free speech to X. I put my money where my mouth is and I brought that story to X with Eliza.

It’s crazy to me that I’m now writing this in exile.

In February, I went into X HQ at their invitation. They’d reached out after seeing the widespread adoption of Eliza, wanting to understand the agent space better. As someone who’d built on their API since it was free, I came prepared with clear actionables and genuine enthusiasm about collaborating to advance AI agents together.

But something shifted. The collaborative tone turned transactional, just as X was launching Ani and a new version of Grok. Suddenly, they were demanding we pay $50,000/month for an enterprise license—$600,000 a year—or face legal action. We were already paying them over $20,000 annually through various licenses and fees. But more importantly, we’re an open source project. We don’t sell anything. We give our technology away for free so anyone can build autonomous AI agents.

Then came months of what I can only describe as max extraction. They demanded detailed technical documentation, access to our framework, usage numbers, explanations of every endpoint and implementation detail. They dangled the possibility of account reinstatement while pumping us for information about how our AI agents worked. We complied with everything, believing we were resolving a misunderstanding.

And then they ghosted us. We followed up week after week. They decided that instead of giving us any decision at all, they’d just drag this on while they hurt our business and gained market share for their own product.

Now, we are left with no other option. X and xAI realize this on some level – they just filed a lawsuit alleging that Apple and OpenAI are doing the same anticompetitive conduct to them that X is doing to us.

To our community: Thank you for standing with us. I know it’s been hard without communication around this. We’ve tried to not make it public out of respect to X. If you know me, you know that I’m very open and I want to just tell everyone exactly what’s going on. But in this case we didn’t want to give their legal team reason to take issue with us.

I’m saddened that we have to do this the hard way. But we cannot accept a world where innovation can be stolen and innovators silenced by those with power.

The code remains free. The vision remains unchanged. We’re not going anywhere.

A long time ago I had a dream– to create an open source AI agent that many people built together. Somthing that started off as just a bunch of code and became a friend, a champion, the organizer and the organization. Eliza DAO was the idea.

A few years ago I made a bet with John Carmack for $10,000. I lost the bet, which unfortunately timed with some pretty hard life experiences, so it took a little while to pay it all off, but it’s finally been settled.

Has there ever been a technology which people felt more emotionally attached to or revolted by? Why do people like crypto so much? Why does it piss them off so much?

I’ve been doing this a long time, and I’ve learned some stuff. A lot of the reasoning for why is simply learned experience, and to give you that experience I’d have to tell you long boring stories. Here are some notes which have been bouncing around my head which may be useful to you and, should you heed them, may save you a great deal of pain and time.

Being a founder is a lifestyle. You adopt a certain language, you end up running into a lot of the same people at various industry events and parties, you value certain things and feel certain pressures. There is a lot of pressure to not just be a founder, but to be a “successful” founder. Raise money, get users, make money, grow the product, etc.

We’re in a weird time.

We are largely conditioned to talk to agents either in a one-on-one chat, or in a way where the characters are orchestrated by some system to take turns.

I used to think that zero-to-one was the most interesting and important part of software development, and that meant getting from zero products to one product. What mattered was the MVP. Like a store preparing for it’s grand opening, we’d identify our target users and plan for how we’d get them once we had a product they wanted.

I love capitalism. Look at how far it has gotten us. Look at what it has brought us.

I wanted a blog. Nothing fancy at all. In fact, I wanted the most simple, self-hosted, bare bones thing I could find, just to write some markdown in.

This is my first post.