It’s so strange how I never write anything anymore. I feel like I’ve really cheapened this entire “project”, but to be honest, I have had an outlet in E since meeting her. I have my social needs met, and I have someone I can talk more than enough to. I’m not really sure how I’m supposed to have the urge to journal when I have that person there who wants to listen.

It’s very clear to me that I can’t have anything to do with my salvation. The chasm between me and God is far too wide, and I will never become perfect. This is something that I’ve realized before, but not to the extent I have realized it now. I’ve given up on myself before, but not to this extent, not yet. I was holding a couple things very tightly in my hand and it was getting painful to hold onto them, so painful that I had to let go.

Today, I went to a group Bible study, which really just turned into a private Q&A session for me because I had too many questions. I should feel bad for the other people that had to sit through that, but I don’t. Fuck them. Maybe not really in a fuck them way, but before I got there today, I was spiraling hard, thinking about ways to ruin my life.

During the Bible study, I was able to get a lot of clarity on some questions on how I was to live my life. First off, here’s the roadmap of my current spiritual journey in chronological order. Steps 1-2 are what I’ve experienced thus far, and everything after it is what I see to be my next steps.

1. In a state of existential despair, looking for a clear cut path to salvation because I believed in God and hell, and would do anything to escape it. Fear dominated here, and I would guilt trip myself over the smallest things, because I was trying to achieve my way to salvation through perfection. I’m always going insane in my head.

2. I give up on myself entirely, realizing that I cannot do anything to achieve my salvation, and if God wants me in hell, I cannot do anything about it. So be it. Fear passes away here into a serenity bordering on lifelessness. I’m still spiraling, not in a way driven by fear, but characterized with a fatalistic carelessness.

3. My next stage is approaching this Christian thing entirely differently. No more chasing after perfection. God is the only one that can give me any kind of understanding of truth, change my heart or life in any meaningful way. It can ONLY come from Him. With that presupposition in mind, I’m going to approach this Christianity from a relationship with God angle instead.

Our pastor said, the reason the Good News is called “Good News” is because when you’ve tried to save yourself and failed at it, and realized that you have no potential — zero potential at all to reach across the chasm between you and God, the fact that Jesus came and died on the cross for us is Good News. He claimed that he’d been a Christian for 44 years, decided he was going to become a pastor early on in his life, but he thinks he just understood the Gospel/Good News a week ago, despite the fact that he’d been preached it hundreds of times. I think what he meant there is that there are different levels to understanding this. I believe I am only at the beginning of coming to understand this, and nobody will ever reach completion in their journey. So there will be many more aha moments incoming.

Duty can very quickly become a bad thing in your relationship with God. I’ve had some problems with this, so I’m really not going to try that hard anymore. Our pastor said that a sign of legalism creeping into your life is if you start feeling guilty when you don’t do the “Christian thing”. If I don’t feel very moved by God to do something, I’m not going to do it anymore. I can’t live my life like this anymore. I need to move on, or I’m going to get cardiac arrest.

Our pastor also said something about fighting the law, and fighting against your sin. If you draw a line in the sand for yourself, you’re sure to cross it. However, if you love God, and have abounding joy in Him, you won’t be too tempted by stuff anymore, because you’re already fulfilled. So that’s why I’m going to stop trying to torture myself to perfection in all areas of my life, whether it be being a better programmer, better Christian, etc.. I’m going to approach it via my relationship with God, and let Him work.

I need to keep my hands off the steering wheel, and hand it to God. But even for that, that’s what God is going to do. I need to stop expecting “basic competency” or good things from myself. That’s simply not a possibility. There’s no point expecting a 3-year old to write mathematical proofs. But that’s a very freeing sensation.

tldr; stop focusing on perfection, focus on the relationship. Do it all in community, because God uses community to teach and show us how it’s done.

The future of shopping isn't happening on a screen. It's happening in the spaces between your words and a machine's understanding of what you want. When you ask an AI agent to find you the best noise-cancelling headphones under £300, you're not just outsourcing a Google search. You're delegating an entire decision-making process to an algorithmic intermediary that will reshape how billions of pounds flow through the digital economy.

This is agentic commerce: AI systems that browse, compare, negotiate, and purchase on behalf of humans. And it's already here. OpenAI's ChatGPT now offers instant checkout for purchases from over one million Shopify merchants. Perplexity launched its Comet browser with AI agents that can autonomously complete purchases from any retailer. Opera introduced Browser Operator, the first major browser with AI-based agentic capabilities built directly into its architecture. Google is expanding its AI Mode shopping interface across the United States, adding capabilities that let customers track prices and confirm purchases without ever visiting a retailer's website.

The numbers tell a story of exponential transformation. Traffic to US retail sites from generative AI browsers and chat services increased 4,700 per cent year-over-year in July 2025, according to industry tracking data. McKinsey projects that by 2030, the US business-to-consumer retail market alone could see up to one trillion dollars in orchestrated revenue from agentic commerce, with global projections reaching three trillion to five trillion dollars.

But these astronomical figures obscure a more fundamental question: When AI agents become the primary interface between consumers and commerce, who actually benefits? The answer is forcing a reckoning across the entire e-commerce ecosystem, from multinational retailers to affiliate marketers, from advertising platforms to regulatory bodies. Because agentic commerce doesn't just change how people shop. It fundamentally rewrites the rules about who gets paid, who gets seen, and who gets trusted in the digital marketplace.

The Funnel Collapses

The traditional e-commerce funnel has been the foundational model of online retail for two decades. Awareness leads to interest, interest leads to consideration, consideration leads to conversion. Each stage represented an opportunity for merchants to influence behaviour through advertising, product placement, personalised recommendations, and carefully optimised user experience. The funnel existed because friction existed: the cognitive load of comparing options, the time cost of browsing multiple sites, the effort required to complete a transaction.

AI agents eliminate that friction by compressing the entire funnel into a single conversational exchange. When a customer arriving via an AI agent reaches a retailer's site, they're already further down the sales funnel with stronger intent to purchase. Research shows these customers are ten per cent more engaged than traditional visitors. The agent has already filtered options, evaluated trade-offs, and narrowed the field. The customer isn't browsing. They're buying.

This compression creates a paradox for retailers. Higher conversion rates and more qualified traffic represent the holy grail of e-commerce optimisation. Yet if the AI agent can compress browsing, selection, and checkout into the same dialogue, retailers that sit outside the conversation risk ceding both visibility and sales entirely.

Boston Consulting Group's modelling suggests potential earnings before interest and taxes erosion of up to 500 basis points for retailers, stemming from price transparency, smaller order sizes, and agent platform fees. That five per cent margin compression might not sound catastrophic until you consider that many retailers operate on margins of ten to fifteen per cent. Agentic commerce could eliminate a third of their profitability.

The risks extend beyond margins. Retailers face diminished direct access to customers, weaker brand loyalty, and growing dependence on intermediary platforms. When customers interact primarily with an AI agent rather than a retailer's website or app, the retailer loses the ability to shape the shopping experience, collect first-party data, or build lasting relationships. The brand becomes commoditised: a product specification in an agent's database rather than a destination in its own right.

This isn't speculation. Walmart announced a partnership with OpenAI enabling seamless “chat to checkout” experiences. Shopify integrated with ChatGPT to allow instant purchases from its merchant base. Etsy followed suit. These aren't defensive moves. They're admissions that the platform layer is shifting, and retailers must establish presence where the conversations are happening, even if it means surrendering control over the customer relationship.

The Revenue Model Revolution

If agentic commerce destroys the traditional funnel, it also demolishes the advertising models built upon that funnel. Consider Google Shopping, which has operated for years on a cost-per-click model with effective commission rates around twelve per cent. Or Amazon, whose marketplace charges sellers approximately fifteen per cent in fees and generates billions more through advertising within search results and product pages. These models depend on human eyeballs viewing sponsored listings, clicking through to product pages, and making purchase decisions influenced by paid placement.

AI agents have no eyeballs. They don't see banner ads or sponsored listings. They process structured data, evaluate parameters, and optimise for the objectives their users specify. The entire edifice of digital retail advertising, which represents a 136 billion dollar industry in 2025, suddenly faces an existential question: How do you advertise to an algorithm?

The early answer appears to be: You don't advertise. You pay for performance. OpenAI has reportedly discussed a two per cent affiliate commission model for purchases made through its shopping features. That's six times lower than Google Shopping's traditional rates and seven times lower than Amazon's marketplace fees. The economics are straightforward. In a world where AI agents handle product discovery and comparison, platforms can charge lower fees because they're not operating expensive advertising infrastructure or maintaining complex seller marketplaces. They're simply connecting buyers and sellers, then taking a cut of completed transactions.

This shift from advertising-based revenue to performance-based commissions has profound implications. Advertisers will spend 12.42 billion dollars on affiliate programmes in 2025, up 10.2 per cent year-over-year, driving thirteen per cent of US e-commerce sales. The affiliate marketing ecosystem has adapted quickly to the rise of AI shopping agents, with seventy per cent of citations for some retailers in large language models stemming from affiliate content.

But the transition hasn't been smooth. Retail affiliate marketing revenues took a hit of over fifteen per cent year-over-year in the second quarter of 2024, when Google's search algorithm updates deprioritised many affiliate sites. If ChatGPT or Perplexity become the primary shopping interfaces, and those platforms negotiate direct relationships with merchants rather than relying on affiliate intermediaries, the affiliate model could face an existential threat.

Yet the performance-based structure of affiliate marketing may also be its salvation. Cost-per-acquisition and revenue-share pricing align perfectly with agentic commerce, where marketing dollars are spent only when a purchase is made. Industry analysts predict retail media networks will reshape into affiliate-like ecosystems, complete with new metrics such as “cost per agent conversion.”

The retail media network model faces even more severe disruption. Retail media networks, which allow brands to advertise within retailer websites and apps, are projected to reach 136 billion dollars in value during 2025. But these networks depend on high human traffic volumes consuming brand messages, sponsored product listings, and targeted advertisements. When agentic AI threatens those traffic volumes by handling shopping outside retailer environments, the entire business model begins to crumble.

The industry response has been to pivot from business-to-consumer advertising to what executives are calling business-to-AI: competing for algorithmic attention rather than human attention. Traditional brand building, with its emphasis on emotional connections, lifestyle aspirations, and community, suddenly becomes the most valuable marketing strategy. Because whilst AI agents can evaluate specifications and compare prices, they still rely on the corpus of available information to make recommendations. A brand that has invested in thought leadership, earned media coverage, and authentic community engagement will appear more frequently in that corpus than a brand that exists only as a product listing in a database.

The new battleground isn't the moment of purchase. It's the moment of instruction, when a human tells an AI agent what they're looking for. Influence that initial framing and you influence the entire transaction.

The Merchant's Dilemma

For retailers, agentic commerce presents an agonising choice. Participate in these new platforms and surrender margin, control, and customer data. Refuse to participate and risk becoming invisible to a growing segment of high-intent shoppers.

The mathematics of merchant incentives in this environment grow complex quickly. If Target and Walmart stock the same product at the same price, how does an AI agent decide which retailer to recommend? In traditional e-commerce, the answer involves search engine optimisation, paid advertising, customer reviews, shipping speed, and loyalty programme benefits. In agentic commerce, the answer increasingly depends on which merchant is willing to pay the AI platform a performance incentive.

Industry analysts worry this creates a “pay to play” dynamic reminiscent of Google's shift from organic search results to advertising-dominated listings. Anyone who has used Google knows how much the first page of search results is stuffed with sponsored listings. Could agentic commerce go the same way? Currently, executives at AI companies insist their algorithms pick the best possible choices without pay-to-play arrangements. But when significant money is involved, the concern is whether those principles can hold.

Perplexity has directly criticised Amazon for being “more interested in serving you ads, sponsored results, and influencing your purchasing decisions with upsells and confusing offers.” The criticism isn't just rhetorical posturing. It's a competitive claim: that AI agents provide a cleaner, more consumer-focused shopping experience precisely because they're not corrupted by advertising revenue. Whether that purity can survive as agentic commerce scales to trillions of pounds in transaction volume remains an open question.

Some merchants are exploring alternative incentive structures. Sales performance incentive funds, where retailers pay commissions to AI platforms only when purchases are completed, align merchant interests with platform performance. Dynamic pricing strategies, where retailers offer AI platforms exclusive pricing in exchange for preferential recommendations, create a more transparent marketplace for algorithmic attention. Subscription models, where merchants pay fixed fees for inclusion in AI agent recommendation databases, avoid the pay-per-click inflation that has plagued search advertising.

But each of these approaches raises questions about transparency, fairness, and consumer welfare. If an AI agent recommends Target over Walmart because Target pays a higher commission, is that a betrayal of the user's trust? Or is it simply the same economic reality that has always governed retail, now made more efficient through automation? The answer depends largely on disclosure: whether users understand the incentives shaping the recommendations they receive.

The Transparency Crisis

Trust is the currency of AI shopping agents. If users don't trust that an agent is acting in their best interests, they won't delegate purchasing decisions. And trust requires transparency: understanding how recommendations are generated, what incentives influence those recommendations, and whether the agent is optimising for the user's preferences or the platform's profit.

The current state of transparency in AI shopping is, charitably, opaque. Most AI platforms provide little visibility into their recommendation algorithms. Users don't know which merchants have paid for preferential placement, how commissions affect product rankings, or what data is being used to personalise suggestions. The Federal Trade Commission has made clear there is no AI exemption from existing consumer protection laws, and firms deploying AI systems have an obligation to ensure those systems are transparent, explainable, fair, and empirically sound.

But transparency in AI systems is technically challenging. The models underlying ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity are “black boxes” even to their creators: neural networks with billions of parameters that produce outputs through processes that defy simple explanation. Algorithmic accountability requires examination of how results are reached, including transparency and justification of the AI model design, setup, and operation. That level of scrutiny is difficult when the systems themselves are proprietary and commercially sensitive.

The FTC has responded by launching Operation AI Comply, taking action against companies that rely on artificial intelligence to supercharge deceptive or unfair conduct. Actions have targeted companies promoting AI tools that enable fake reviews, businesses making unsupported claims about AI capabilities, and platforms that mislead consumers about how AI systems operate. The message is clear: automation doesn't absolve responsibility. If an AI agent makes false claims, deceptive recommendations, or unfair comparisons, the platform operating that agent is liable.

Bias represents another dimension of the transparency challenge. Research on early AI shopping agents revealed troubling patterns. Agents failed to conduct exhaustive comparisons, instead settling for the first “good enough” option they encountered. This creates what researchers call a “first-proposal bias” that gives response speed a ten to thirty times advantage over actual quality. If an agent evaluates the first few results more thoroughly than later results, merchants have an incentive to ensure their products appear early in whatever databases the agent queries.

Data bias, algorithmic bias, and user bias are the main types of bias in AI e-commerce systems. Data bias occurs when training data isn't representative of actual shopping patterns, leading to recommendations that favour certain demographics, price points, or product categories. Algorithmic bias emerges from how models weigh different factors, potentially overvaluing characteristics that correlate with protected categories. User bias happens when AI agents learn from and amplify existing consumer prejudices rather than challenging them.

The automation bias problem compounds these challenges. People may be unduly trusting of answers from machines which seem neutral or impartial. Many chatbots are effectively built to persuade, designed to answer queries in confident language even when those answers are fictional. The tendency to trust AI output creates vulnerability when that output is shaped by undisclosed commercial incentives or reflects biased training data.

Microsoft recently conducted an experiment where they gave AI agents virtual currency and instructed them to make online purchases. The agents spent all the money on scams. This wasn't a failure of the AI's reasoning capability. It was a failure of the AI's ability to assess trust and legitimacy in an environment designed to deceive. If sophisticated AI systems from a leading technology company can be systematically fooled by online fraud, what does that mean for consumer protection when millions of people delegate purchasing decisions to similar agents?

The Regulatory Response

Regulators worldwide are scrambling to develop frameworks for agentic commerce before it becomes too embedded to govern effectively. New AI-specific laws have emerged to mandate proactive transparency, bias prevention, and consumer disclosures not otherwise required under baseline consumer protection statutes.

The FTC's position emphasises that existing consumer protection laws apply to AI systems. Using artificial intelligence and algorithms doesn't provide exemption from legal obligations around truthfulness, fairness, and non-discrimination. The agency has published guidance stating that AI tools should be transparent, explainable, fair, and empirically sound, whilst fostering accountability.

European regulators are taking a more prescriptive approach through the AI Act, which classifies AI systems by risk level and imposes requirements accordingly. Shopping agents that significantly influence purchasing decisions would likely qualify as high-risk systems, triggering obligations around transparency, human oversight, and impact assessment. The regulation mandates clear disclosure of whether an entity is human or artificial, responding to the increasing sophistication of AI interactions. Under the AI Act's framework, providers of high-risk AI systems must maintain detailed documentation of their training data, conduct conformity assessments before deployment, and implement post-market monitoring to detect emerging risks. Violations can result in fines up to seven per cent of global annual turnover.

But enforcement remains challenging. The opacity of black box models means consumers have no transparency into how exactly decisions are being made. Regulators often lack the technical expertise to evaluate these systems, and by the time they develop that expertise, the technology has evolved. The European Union is establishing an AI Office with dedicated technical staff and budget to build regulatory capacity, whilst the UK is pursuing a sector-specific approach that empowers existing regulators like the Competition and Markets Authority to address AI-related harms in their domains.

The cross-border nature of AI platforms creates additional complications. An AI agent operated by a US company, trained on data from multiple countries, making purchases from international merchants, creates a jurisdictional nightmare. Which country's consumer protection laws apply? Whose privacy regulations govern the data collection? Who has enforcement authority when harm occurs? The fragmentation extends beyond Western democracies. China's Personal Information Protection Law and algorithmic recommendation regulations impose requirements on AI systems operating within its borders, creating a third major regulatory regime that global platforms must navigate.

Industry self-regulation has emerged to fill some gaps. OpenAI and Anthropic developed the Agentic Commerce Protocol, a technical standard for how AI agents should interact with merchant systems. The protocol includes provisions for identifying agent traffic, disclosing commercial relationships, and maintaining transaction records. Google and Amazon rely on separate, incompatible systems, making it difficult for merchants to translate product catalogues into multiple formats.

The question of liability looms large. When an AI agent makes a purchase that the user later regrets, who is responsible? The user who gave the instruction? The platform that operated the agent? The merchant that fulfilled the order? Traditional consumer protection frameworks assume human decision-makers at each step. Agentic commerce distributes decision-making across human-AI interactions in ways that blur lines of responsibility.

The intellectual property dimensions add further complexity. Amazon has sued Perplexity, accusing the startup of violating its terms of service by using AI agents to access the platform without disclosing their automated nature. Amazon argues that Perplexity's agents degrade the Amazon shopping experience by showing products that don't incorporate personalised recommendations and may not reflect the fastest delivery options available. Perplexity counters that since its agent acts on behalf of a human user's direction, the agent automatically has the same permissions as the human user.

This dispute encapsulates the broader regulatory challenge: existing legal frameworks weren't designed for a world where software agents act autonomously on behalf of humans, making decisions, negotiating terms, and executing transactions.

The Power Redistribution

Step back from the technical and regulatory complexities, and agentic commerce reveals itself as fundamentally about power. Power to control the shopping interface. Power to influence purchasing decisions. Power to capture transaction fees. Power to shape which businesses thrive and which wither.

For decades, that power has been distributed across an ecosystem of search engines, social media platforms, e-commerce marketplaces, payment processors, and retailers themselves. Google controlled discovery through search. Facebook controlled attention through social feeds. Amazon controlled transactions through its marketplace. Each entity extracted value from its position in the funnel, and merchants paid tribute at multiple stages to reach customers.

Agentic commerce threatens to consolidate that distributed power into whoever operates the AI agents that consumers trust. If ChatGPT becomes the primary shopping interface for hundreds of millions of users, OpenAI captures influence that currently belongs to Google, Amazon, and every retailer's individual website. The company that mediates between consumer intent and commercial transaction holds extraordinary leverage over the entire economy.

This consolidation is already visible in partnership announcements. When Walmart, Shopify, and Etsy all integrate with ChatGPT within weeks of each other, they're acknowledging that OpenAI has become a gatekeeper they cannot afford to ignore. The partnerships are defensive, ensuring presence on a platform that could otherwise bypass them entirely.

But consolidation isn't inevitable. The market could fragment across multiple AI platforms, each with different strengths, biases, and commercial relationships. Google's AI Mode might excel at product discovery for certain categories. Perplexity's approach might appeal to users who value transparency over convenience. Smaller, specialised agents could emerge for specific verticals like fashion, electronics, or groceries.

The trajectory will depend partly on technical factors: which platforms build the most capable agents, integrate with the most merchants, and create the smoothest user experiences. But it will also depend on trust and regulation. If early AI shopping agents generate high-profile failures, consumer confidence could stall adoption. If regulators impose strict requirements that only the largest platforms can meet, consolidation accelerates.

For consumers, the implications are ambiguous. Agentic commerce promises convenience, efficiency, and potentially better deals through automated comparison and negotiation. Customers arriving via AI agents already demonstrate higher engagement and purchase intent. More than half of consumers anticipate using AI assistants for shopping by the end of 2025. Companies deploying AI shopping agents are delivering thirty per cent more conversions and forty per cent faster order fulfilment.

But those benefits come with risks. Loss of serendipity and discovery as agents optimise narrowly for stated preferences rather than exposing users to unexpected products. Erosion of privacy as more shopping behaviour flows through platforms that profile and monetise user data. Concentration of market power in the hands of a few AI companies that control access to billions of customers. Vulnerability to manipulation if agents' recommendations are influenced by undisclosed commercial arrangements.

Consider a concrete scenario. A parent asks an AI agent to find educational toys for a six-year-old who loves science. The agent might efficiently identify age-appropriate chemistry sets and astronomy kits based on thousands of product reviews and educational research. But if the agent prioritises products from merchants paying higher commissions over genuinely superior options, or if it lacks awareness of recent safety recalls, convenience becomes a liability. The parent saves time but potentially compromises on quality or safety in ways they would have caught through traditional research.

Marketplace or Manipulation

Agentic commerce is not a future possibility. It is a present reality growing at exponential rates. The question is not whether AI shopping agents will reshape retail, but how that reshaping will unfold and who will benefit from the transformation.

The optimistic scenario involves healthy competition between multiple AI platforms, strong transparency requirements that help users understand recommendation incentives, effective regulation that prevents the worst abuses whilst allowing innovation, and merchants who adapt by focusing on brand building, product quality, and authentic relationships.

In this scenario, consumers enjoy unprecedented convenience and potentially lower prices through automated comparison shopping. Merchants reach highly qualified customers with strong purchase intent. AI platforms create genuine value by reducing friction and improving matching between needs and products. Regulators establish guardrails that prevent manipulation whilst allowing experimentation. Picture a marketplace where an AI agent negotiates bulk discounts on behalf of a neighbourhood buying group, secures better warranty terms through automated comparison of coverage options, and flags counterfeit products by cross-referencing manufacturer databases, all whilst maintaining transparent logs of its decision-making process that users can audit.

The pessimistic scenario involves consolidation around one or two dominant AI platforms that extract monopoly rents, opaque algorithms shaped by undisclosed commercial relationships that systematically favour paying merchants over best products, regulatory capture or inadequacy that allows harmful practices to persist, and a race to the bottom on merchant margins that destroys business viability for all but the largest players.

In this scenario, consumers face an illusion of choice backed by recommendations shaped more by who pays the AI platform than by genuine product quality. Merchants become commodity suppliers in a system they can't influence without paying increasing fees. AI platforms accumulate extraordinary power and profit through their gatekeeper position. Imagine a future where small businesses cannot afford the fees to appear in AI agent recommendations, where platforms subtly steer purchases toward their own private-label products, and where consumers have no practical way to verify whether they're receiving genuinely optimal recommendations or algorithmically optimised profit extraction.

Reality will likely fall somewhere between these extremes. Some markets will consolidate whilst others fragment. Some AI platforms will maintain rigorous standards whilst others cut corners. Some regulators will successfully enforce transparency whilst others lack resources or authority. The outcome will be determined by choices made over the next few years by technology companies, policymakers, merchants, and consumers themselves.

The Stakeholder Reckoning

For technology companies building AI shopping agents, the critical choice is whether to prioritise short-term revenue maximisation through opaque commercial relationships or long-term trust building through transparency and user alignment. The companies that choose trust will likely capture sustainable competitive advantage as consumers grow more sophisticated about evaluating AI recommendations.

For policymakers, the challenge is crafting regulation that protects consumers without stifling the genuine benefits that agentic commerce can provide. Disclosure requirements, bias auditing, interoperability standards, and clear liability frameworks can establish baseline guardrails without prescribing specific technological approaches. The most effective regulatory strategies will focus on outcomes rather than methods: requiring transparency in how recommendations are generated, mandating disclosure of commercial relationships that influence agent behaviour, establishing accountability when AI systems cause consumer harm, and creating mechanisms for independent auditing of algorithmic decision-making. Policymakers must act quickly enough to prevent entrenchment of harmful practices but thoughtfully enough to avoid crushing innovation that could genuinely benefit consumers.

For merchants, adaptation means shifting from optimising for human eyeballs to optimising for algorithmic evaluation and human trust simultaneously. The retailers that will thrive are those that maintain compelling brands, deliver genuine value, and build direct relationships with customers that no AI intermediary can fully replace. This requires investment in product quality, authentic customer service, and brand building that goes beyond algorithmic gaming. Merchants who compete solely on price or visibility in AI agent recommendations will find themselves in a race to the bottom. Those who create products worth recommending and brands worth trusting will discover that AI agents amplify quality rather than obscuring it.

For consumers, the imperative is developing critical literacy about how AI shopping agents work, what incentives shape their recommendations, and when to trust algorithmic suggestions versus conducting independent research. Blind delegation is dangerous. Thoughtful use of AI as a tool for information gathering and comparison, combined with final human judgment, represents the responsible approach. This means asking questions about how agents generate recommendations, understanding what commercial relationships might influence those recommendations, and maintaining the habit of spot-checking AI suggestions against independent sources. Consumer demand for transparency can shape how these systems develop, but only if consumers actively seek that transparency rather than passively accepting algorithmic guidance.

Who Controls the Algorithm Controls Commerce

The fundamental question agentic commerce poses is who gets to shape the marketplace of the future. Will it be the AI platforms that control the interface? The merchants with the deepest pockets to pay for visibility? The regulators writing the rules? Or the consumers whose aggregate choices ultimately determine what succeeds?

The answer is all of the above, in complex interaction. But that interaction will produce very different outcomes depending on the balance of power. If consumers remain informed and engaged, if regulators act decisively to require transparency, if merchants compete on quality rather than just algorithmic gaming, and if AI platforms choose sustainable trust over exploitative extraction, then agentic commerce could genuinely improve how billions of people meet their needs.

If those conditions don't hold, we're building a shopping future where the invisible hand of the market gets replaced by the invisible hand of the algorithm, and where that algorithm serves the highest bidder rather than the human asking for help. The stakes are not just commercial. They're about what kind of economy we want to inhabit: one where technology amplifies human agency or one where it substitutes algorithmic optimisation for human choice.

The reshape is already underway. The revenue is already flowing through new channels. The questions about trust and transparency are already urgent. What happens next depends on decisions being made right now, in boardrooms and regulatory offices and user interfaces, about how to build the infrastructure of algorithmic commerce. Get those decisions right and we might create something genuinely better than what came before. Get them wrong and we'll spend decades untangling the consequences.

The invisible hand of AI is reaching for your wallet. The question is whether you'll notice before it's already spent your money.

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Sources and References

1. McKinsey & Company (2025). “The agentic commerce opportunity: How AI agents are ushering in a new era for consumers and merchants.” McKinsey QuantumBlack Insights.

2. Boston Consulting Group (2025). “Agentic Commerce is Redefining Retail: How to Respond.” BCG Publications.

3. Opera Software (March 2025). “Opera becomes the first major browser with AI-based agentic browsing.” Opera Newsroom Press Release.

4. Opera Software (May 2025). “Meet Opera Neon, the new AI agentic browser.” Opera News Blog.

5. Digital Commerce 360 (October 2025). “McKinsey forecasts up to $5 trillion in agentic commerce sales by 2030.”

6. TechCrunch (September 2025). “OpenAI takes on Google, Amazon with new agentic shopping system.”

7. TechCrunch (March 2025). “Opera announces a new agentic feature for its browser.”

8. PYMNTS.com (2025). “Agentic AI Is Quietly Reshaping the eCommerce Funnel.”

9. Retail Brew (October 2025). “AI agents are becoming a major e-commerce channel. Will retailers beat them or join them?”

10. eMarketer (2025). “As consumers turn to AI for shopping, affiliate marketing is forging its own path.”

11. Retail TouchPoints (2025). “Agentic Commerce Meets Retail ROI: How the Affiliate Model Powers the Future of AI-Led Shopping.”

12. Federal Trade Commission (2023). “The Luring Test: AI and the engineering of consumer trust.”

13. Federal Trade Commission (2025). “AI and the Risk of Consumer Harm.”

14. Federal Trade Commission (2024). “FTC Announces Crackdown on Deceptive AI Claims and Schemes.”

15. Bloomberg (November 2025). “Amazon Demands Perplexity Stop AI Tool's Purchasing Ability.”

16. CNBC (November 2025). “Perplexity AI accuses Amazon of bullying with legal threat over Comet browser.”

17. Retail Dive (November 2025). “Amazon sues Perplexity over AI shopping agents.”

18. Criteo (2025). “Retail media in the agentic era.”

19. Bizcommunity (2025). “Retail media: Agentic AI commerce arrives, estimated value of $136bn in 2025.”

20. The Drum (June 2025). “How AI is already innovating retail media's next phase.”

21. Brookings Institution (2024). “Algorithmic bias detection and mitigation: Best practices and policies to reduce consumer harms.”

22. Lawfare Media (2024). “Are Existing Consumer Protections Enough for AI?”

23. The Regulatory Review (2025). “A Modern Consumer Bill of Rights in the Age of AI.”

24. Decrypt (November 2025). “Microsoft Gave AI Agents Fake Money to Buy Things Online. They Spent It All on Scams.”

25. Mastercard (April 2025). “Mastercard unveils Agent Pay, pioneering agentic payments technology to power commerce in the age of AI.”

26. Payments Dive (2025). “Visa, Mastercard race to agentic AI commerce.”

27. Fortune (October 2025). “Walmart's deal with ChatGPT should worry every ecommerce small business.”

28. Harvard Business Review (February 2025). “AI Agents Are Changing How People Shop. Here's What That Means for Brands.”

29. Adweek (2025). “AI Shopping Is Here but Brands and Retailers Are Still on the Sidelines.”

30. Klaviyo Blog (2025). “AI Shopping: 6 Ways Brands Can Adapt Their Online Presence.”

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

In Summary: * And a very satisfying Wednesday draws close to its end. With Gregorian Chant playing softly in the background I'm finishing my night prayers. After that, some quiet reading will take me to bedtime.

Prayers, etc.: * My daily prayers

Health Metrics: * bw= 222.78 lbs. * bp= 142/81 (66)

Exercise: * kegel pelvic floor exercise, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups

Diet: * 06:30 – 1 peanut butter sandwich * 07:25 – fried rice with shrimp, chicken, and meat * 10:00 – 1 fresh orange * 11:30 – rice based casserole cooked with different meats and vegetables

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:30 – listen to local news talk radio * 05:50 – bank accounts activity monitored * 05:55 – read, pray, listen to news reports from various sources * 13:00 to 15:00 – watch old game shows with Sylvia * 16:30 – listening to the pregame show ahead of tonight's NCAA women's basketball game when the Western Michigan Broncos travel to Bloomington, Indiana to face the Indiana Hoosiers. I'll stay with this station for the radio call of the game. * 18:35 – After a satisfying win (Lady Hoosiers 71 – Western Michigan 53) my plans now are to listen to relaxing music, do my night prayers, and quietly read until bedtime.

Chess: * 15:45 – moved in all pending CC games

By L. Moraitis

A republic lives or dies by the courage of its citizens. Constitutions can formalize powers, balance institutions, and distribute authority, but no constitutional structure can compensate for a population that has forgotten how to deliberate in public without fear. The mixed constitution—Aristotle’s balanced polity, Polybius’s Roman model, Montesquieu’s separation of powers—was never merely a diagram of institutions. It was a training ground for fearless civic character. Its purpose was to produce not simply order, but citizens capable of sustaining liberty through disciplined courage.

Fearless deliberation is the antidote to two perennial dangers: the tyranny of the few and the volatility of the many. Monarchs and oligarchs thrive when public speech is timid, when dissent becomes a private whisper. Pure democracies decay when citizens abandon reason for passion and noise. The mixed constitution counters both dangers by institutionalizing conflict within bounds: executives check assemblies, aristocracies check demagogues, the people check corruption. But these checks function only when citizens are willing to speak boldly, criticize power openly, and confront each other’s arguments without retreating into tribal comfort.

In this sense, the mixed constitution is masculinist in its metaphor: it demands civic toughness, not in the biological or gendered sense, but in the classical sense of virtus, andreia—virtue understood as capacity for public risk. Courage is not merely a military virtue; it is the willingness to stand unarmed in the public square and give reasons. This was the core insight of both the Athenian assembly and the Roman senate. A polity in which citizens fear reputational destruction, legal retaliation, or social ostracism for speaking honestly cannot deliberate; and where deliberation fails, the mixed constitution collapses into either factional war or administrative despotism.

Mixed constitutions restrain power precisely to create space for fearless speech. When no single faction can dominate, citizens can express disagreement without immediate danger. When power is divided, truth-telling becomes possible; when power is monopolized, even truth whispered becomes perilous. Thus, the structure of the constitution serves the virtue of the citizen, and the virtue of the citizen sustains the structure.

The republic of the unafraid is not a society without conflict. It is a society where conflict is public, principled, and bounded—the crucible in which rational self-rule is forged. Fearless deliberation is not the ornament of a free society; it is the price of admission.

In July 2023, an anonymous Reddit post quietly appeared on the /r/aliens subreddit, claiming to be a confession from a former government–adjacent molecular biologist. The author said they had spent years dissecting and characterizing the bodies of “Exo-Biospheric-Organisms” (EBOs) in a secret lab buried under Fort Detrick, Maryland.

Within hours the post was removed and the account vanished, which only made the story spread faster.

Copies of the text were archived and reposted across the web, from mirrors to UFO blogs and forums.

The result is one of the most elaborate “alien biology” narratives to hit the internet in years: part lab notebook, part theology, part science-fiction.

This article breaks down what the EBO leaker actually claimed, how it fits with real-world biology and facilities, why it grabbed so many people, and how plausible any of it really is.

Where the Story Came From

The original post appeared on /r/aliens in early July 2023 and was titled:

“From the late 2000s to the mid-2010s, I worked as a molecular biologist for a national security contractor in a program to study Exo-Biospheric-Organisms (EBO).”

The account:

• Claimed to be a PhD-level molecular biologist
• Described working for a “national security contractor”
• Said the work was done in a restricted lab space at Fort Detrick, Maryland
• Identified the operator as Battelle National Biodefense Institute (BNBI)

BNBI is a real organization. It manages the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC) at Fort Detrick for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. NBACC is a high-containment biodefense facility built in the mid-2000s to study biological threats and forensic analysis of biocrimes.

So at minimum, the leaker anchored their story to a real, high-security lab with a plausible mandate for weird biology.

The author framed the post as a one-way leak: they explicitly said they would not testify to the Senate or talk to AARO, and that they possessed no evidence beyond the text itself. They described this as a compromise between their moral urge to “tell humanity” and their desire not to get themselves or their family into danger.

Who the Leaker Claims to Be

The author’s self-portrait is deliberately fuzzy:

• PhD in molecular biology
• Recruited informally at a scientific conference after chatting with a senior scientist
• Put through several increasingly “suspicious” interviews where scientific expertise became less relevant
• Required to sign a very detailed NDA, explained in person by a lawyer-type

Once hired, they say their first weeks were spent in a basement archive room at Fort Detrick, reading internal reports, memos, SOPs and briefings on EBOs: their biology, diet, religion, culture, and so on.

The scientific structure they describe is familiar to anyone who’s seen a large biomedical program:

• ~20 PhD-level scientists doing hands-on lab work
• 4 senior scientists who design assays and supervise
• 1 director who sets priorities and is rarely on site
• Security guards from contractors
• No janitors or support staff; scientists do their own cleaning and maintenance

Internet access is restricted to senior staff, with an internal intranet for bioinformatics.

So far, nothing exotic: the weird part is what they say they were studying.

Inside the Alleged EBO Program

The stated goal of the program is to characterize the genome and proteome of EBOs: to decode their DNA and catalog the proteins they make.

According to the post:

• The lab runs at BSL-3 for anything involving EBO samples or cell culture, with a connected BSL-2 area for most assays and normal cell lines.
• The BSL-3 section includes a freezer room and a dedicated EBO cell culture space.
• Four incomplete EBO bodies are stored in horizontal freezers at –80 °C, vacuum-bagged in a humidity-controlled environment. All show major traumatic injuries.

The author says they never saw live EBOs, only carcasses and derived cell lines.

One of the key tools is an EBO epithelial cell line called EPI-G11, allegedly developed by another team. This line supposedly:

• Can be transfected with EBO genes via a gene gun (other methods kill it or fail)
• Enters exponential growth in response to fetal bovine serum, like many eukaryotic cell lines
• Is used as a platform to overexpress and purify EBO proteins for analysis

So the story is framed much like a very niche, very classified biotech program: nothing magical, just everyday molecular biology applied to something extraordinary.

The Genetics of the EBOs

The genetics section is what drew a lot of scientists’ attention, because it is very detailed and uses real concepts correctly.

According to the leaker, EBOs:

• Use DNA as their genetic material
• Are eukaryotic (cells have nuclei)
• Have 16 circular chromosomes
• Have a genome that’s much smaller and more streamlined than ours

Circular chromosomes are common in bacteria and some single-celled eukaryotes, but are not seen in known animals on Earth. That alone makes the design odd: you’d essentially have an animal-like organism with microbial-style genome architecture.

The EBO genome is described as having:

1. Highly uniform intergenic regions (“junk DNA”)

   • The non-coding regions between genes are nearly identical in sequence and length across the genome.
   • This would be extremely unusual in natural evolution, where these regions are messy, repetitive, and full of ancient molecular debris.

2. A structured Tri-Palindromic Region (TPR) in front of every gene

   • A 134-base sequence containing three palindromic segments separated by spacers.
   • Inside the TPR are a 4-base “chromosome address” (unique per chromosome) and a 64-base “gene address” (unique per gene across the entire genome).
   • In other words, each gene carries a built-in machine-readable positional address.

The leaker suggests that this TPR architecture allows incredibly precise genetic engineering: external tools could, in principle, seek out and edit any gene by targeting its address, essentially treating the genome as a keyed database.

The EBO genome is also said to contain:

• Many genes analogous to human genes
• Some sequences that match known human or animal genes nucleotide-for-nucleotide
• A large set of genes with no known terrestrial homology

This mishmash is offered as proof that EBOs are chimeras: organisms built by combining Earth-derived genes with unknown ones from another biosphere.

From a storytelling perspective, it’s clever. From a lab perspective, it raises questions: if whoever built these organisms can engineer such an elegant addressing scheme, why are they brute-copy-pasting mammalian genes instead of designing their own equivalents? The mixture of very polished design and crude “copy-and-paste” feels conceptually odd.

Anatomy & Physiology: The “Grey” Worker Body

Morphologically, the EBOs described in the leak line up closely with pop-culture “greys”:

• Height around 150 cm
• Enlarged head with huge, dark eyes
• Slender neck and torso
• Four-fingered hands with long digits
• Two narrow toes per foot (each toe made from two fused digits)
• No genitals, navel, nipples, or anus

Some of the more striking anatomical claims:

Skin & Excretion

• The typical “grey” skin is said to be a biosynthetic film, like an environmental suit tightly bonded to the body.
• Underneath, the skin is pale, hairless and covered with countless pores connected to glands.
• Instead of urination or defecation, metabolic waste is excreted as an ammonia-rich fluid through these pores, where it evaporates and cools the body.
• A combined hepato-renal organ functions as both liver and kidney, filtering blood and pushing waste into a branching system that feeds the pores in all four limbs.

This design doubles the waste system as a kind of sweat-based cooling mechanism and explains the repeated mention of a strong ammonia stench when the protective film is removed.

Digestive System

The digestive system is extremely simplified:

• The mouth is a narrow slit, with no teeth or tongue.
• There is a pseudo-stomach acting only as a reservoir.
• The intestine is described as equivalent to a small intestine, focused on absorption.
• Undigested material flows straight into the hepato-renal organ and is eventually expelled with metabolic waste.

Given this, the leaker concludes that EBOs can only consume liquid nutrition, some kind of sugar- and protein-rich broth, likely with high copper content to match the rest of their physiology.

Circulatory & Respiratory Systems

• The heart is four-chambered, similar in basic layout to ours.
• Lungs have unidirectional airflow (like birds), which is more efficient and fits with the high metabolic demands of their oversized brain.
• The blood is brownish and plasma-rich, with high metal ion concentrations, especially copper.
• Red blood cells allegedly bind copper as well as iron, possibly to help neutralize the large ammonia load.

Skeleton & Muscles

• Bones are collagen- and hydroxyapatite-based like ours, but the marrow is replaced by copper oxide crystals.
• Bone remodeling cells (osteoclasts) appear absent, suggesting fixed, non-adapting bones.
• Muscle mass is low, especially in the limbs and torso, with a dominance of slow-twitch fibers.

The overall picture is of a physically weak, highly specialized body optimized for controlled environments and cognitive work, not for survival in a natural ecosystem.

Nervous System & Brain

• The brain is “tetraspheric” (four main lobes) with a central lobe acting like a combined brainstem and cerebellum.
• Volume is about 20% larger than a human of the same height.
• Gyrication (folding) and glia-to-neuron ratios are both higher than in humans.
• Distinct nodules on the central lobe show “biological circuitry” and are suspected to be involved in interfacing with their technology. Mapping the proteome of these nodules is described as a priority of the program.

The author also speculates about possible artificial molecular machines in the body that might depend on copper, though they admit none have been observed.

The EBO “Soul Field” Religion

One of the more surprising parts of the leak is the claim that EBOs have a sophisticated metaphysics centered on a “soul field.”

According to the documents the leaker says they read:

• Consciousness is not a property of individual beings, but an emergent manifestation of a fundamental field pervading the universe, analogous to gravity.
• As life becomes more abundant and complex, the structure of this field becomes more ordered and information-rich.
• When sentient life appears, the field begins to express itself through those minds, which then feed back into the field through their experiences.
• Over time, this positive feedback pushes the field toward a critical threshold, culminating in an apotheosis event whose nature is unclear.

This worldview allegedly leads to:

• Little fear of death (the individual dissolves, but their experiences persist in the field)
• A culture that prioritizes the field’s long-term evolution over individual rights or well-being
• A mission to seed, shape, and shepherd life across the cosmos in service of this future apotheosis

In other words, the EBOs see themselves not as conquerors or tourists, but as cosmic gardeners pushing the universe toward some informational singularity.

From a narrative standpoint, this is very on-brand: detached, utilitarian “caretakers” who treat us like lab animals while insisting it’s for the greater metaphysical good.

Why This Story Blew Up

There are a few reasons this particular leak went viral:

1. It’s extremely detailed and technically literate. The post reads like a cross between an SOP and a review article, especially in the genetics section. That sets it apart from the usual “I saw a light in the sky” stuff.

2. It hooks into a real facility. Fort Detrick and BNBI/NBACC are genuine national-security biotech operations, with a mandate to handle exotic pathogens and high-risk agents. Placing the story there gives it a veneer of plausibility.

3. It fits the cultural moment. The post arrived amid UAP hearings, whistleblower news cycles, and increasing mainstream coverage of “non-human biologics” claims. UFO-adjacent media and YouTube channels picked it up almost immediately.

4. The deletion drama. The author complained in the post that their comments were being removed; shortly after, the whole account disappeared, and the main post was taken down. Mirrored copies and reposts quickly proliferated, which is exactly how modern myth-making works online.

Put bluntly: this is exactly the kind of story built to thrive on the internet. Just enough real-world scaffolding to feel grounded, just enough mystery and removal to scream “they’re trying to hide this.”

Does Any of This Actually Hold Up?

Short answer: there is no evidence beyond the text itself, and the community that’s looked at it most closely tends to treat it as a very well-crafted piece of creative writing.

Longer answer, broken out:

1. Facilities: Plausible Scene, Missing Evidence

NBACC/BNBI at Fort Detrick is real, and its mission is genuinely about biodefense and high-containment experimental work for DHS.

That makes it a credible setting. But:

• There is no independent indication that NBACC is working on alien bodies.
• Naming your actual former facility in public while claiming to be terrified of government retaliation is a strange choice.

If the story were true, investigators wouldn’t have many possible starting points.

2. Genetics: Elegant, Maybe Too Elegant

Genetics-literate readers have pointed out that:

• A DNA-based alien with eukaryotic cells is possible if there’s some shared ancestry or directed panspermia, but it’s far from guaranteed. The story glosses over how unlikely that convergence would be.
• Circular chromosomes are not used by any known multicellular animals; they appear in bacteria and some single-celled eukaryotes. To then combine that with human-like genes and regulatory architecture is an eccentric design choice.
• A fixed, uniform intergenic spacing and a full addressing scheme in every gene (the TPR) is very “engineer-brain”: more like how a software developer would design a neat database than how evolution actually works.

The system is internally consistent and imaginative, but that actually pushes it toward feeling like a thought experiment or LARP rather than an authentic lab leak.

3. Physiology: Exotic but Suspiciously Human-Centric

Several skeptics have noted that the EBO body plan is essentially “human, but gamified”:

• Same gross anatomy (bipedal, same basic organs) with some removed for effect (no genitals, no anus, simplified digestion).
• A few knobs turned for sci-fi flavor (tetraspheric brain, copper crystals in bones, ammonia excretion).

There’s also a broader conceptual issue: if this is an engineered, disposable worker caste designed for specific tasks in controlled environments, why base it so heavily on terrestrial human physiology at all? Why mimic our skeletal muscles, heart layout, and limb structure, instead of designing bodies purely optimized for whatever they’re supposed to do?

4. The Leaker’s Behavior

The author:

• Claims to have read deeply sensitive archival material and worked directly with classified biological samples.
• Publicly names the facility operator and location (BNBI at Fort Detrick).
• Declares they will never present evidence, testify, or otherwise substantiate anything because it “sounds like a honey trap.”

So they’re willing to expose a specific facility, but not willing to provide even a single anonymized document, redacted image, or independent detail that could be cross-checked. It’s an odd line to draw if you assume they are genuinely concerned about operational security.

5. Community Reception

Places that specialize in skeptical analysis have mostly filed this under “interesting, but almost certainly fiction.” Common points:

• There is no evidence to “debunk”; it’s just a block of text.
• The aliens are perhaps too conveniently similar to humans, with missing parts and tweaks that align with narrative needs rather than evolutionary ones.
• The religion section and “soul field” philosophy read like speculative metaphysics layered onto the biology for extra flavor.

Even relatively neutral commentators who enjoy the story tend to conclude that it’s either a carefully constructed LARP or an elaborate science-fiction world-building exercise that escaped into the wild.

So What Do We Do With Stories Like This?

If you treat this as literal truth, you’re left with a fairly bleak picture:

• Disposable engineered beings with no independent survival capacity
• A “caretaker” species whose theology justifies total disregard for individual life
• A clandestine human program dissecting their corpses in a government lab

If you treat it as fiction, it’s still doing something interesting:

• It serves as a thought experiment in xenobiology and engineered genomes.
• It sketches a plausible near-future level of bioengineering where genomes are fully addressable and castes are designed, not bred.
• It reflects our current anxieties: about AI, about being someone else’s lab rats, about institutions hiding world-shaking truths.

Crucially, nothing in the leak advances us one millimeter toward actual evidence of non-human life. It’s text. No tissue samples, no sequences we can independently analyze, no corroborating whistleblowers from the same alleged program.

By contrast, the real search for life elsewhere is happening in painfully uncinematic ways: spectroscopy of exoplanet atmospheres, analysis of strange chemistry in our own solar system, modeling biosignatures, and so on. Those efforts move slowly, publish their data, and don’t vanish after a Reddit mod hits “remove.”

Conclusion

The EBO scientist leaker story is a perfect artifact of our time:

• Technically literate enough to hook scientists and engineers
• Rooted in real national-security infrastructure to feel grounded
• Infused with metaphysical lore to satisfy the spiritual angle
• Carefully starved of evidence so it can never be definitively disproven

Is it true? There’s no solid reason to think so, and several reasons to suspect it’s not. But as a piece of modern myth-making, it’s undeniably effective.

Whether you file it under “credible leak,” “fiction with homework,” or “elaborate LARP,” the safest stance is the boring one: enjoy the speculation, keep your critical thinking switched on, and don’t confuse narrative coherence with actual proof.

If someone ever shows up with an actual EBO genome in FASTA format, then it’s time to panic.

This is a deep dive into the anonymous claims that captivated the UFO community in 2023'

In April 2023, an anonymous poster appeared on 4chan's /x/ board with a simple opening line:

“I have intimate knowledge of what the US currently knows about UFOs minus the last two years.”

He claimed to be a former insider with access to UFO crash recoveries and classified programs, now undergoing chemotherapy for liver cancer. Facing the possibility of not having much time left, he chose the most chaotic confession booth imaginable: a 4chan thread.

Over the course of two lengthy sessions spanning nearly two weeks, this individual answered hundreds of questions with an unusual level of consistency and detail that set their posts apart from the typical “LARP” (Live Action Role Play) that plagues anonymous forums.

Whether genuine insider or elaborate fiction, these threads offer one of the most comprehensive, internally consistent accounts of alleged government UFO knowledge ever posted online. They have already become a notable node in modern UFO lore.

This is their story.

The Start

The first post arrived on April 24, 2023, with five core claims that would frame everything that followed:

1. UFOs are primarily unmanned drones

2. UFOs are built to specification each time they are deployed

3. UFOs are created by a mobile construction facility hiding in the ocean

4. This construction facility destroys anything that approaches it

5. The U.S. believes this facility has been active on Earth for at least 100 years, possibly much longer

These claims immediately distinguished the poster from typical UFO narratives. No talk of crashed saucers from Zeta Reticuli, no galactic federations, no channeled messages from Ashtar Command. Instead, the picture that emerged was almost industrial: a manufacturing operation, hidden beneath the waves, churning out specialized drones for specific missions before recycling them back into raw materials.

“Atlantis”: The Underwater UFO Factory

Perhaps the most striking element of the whistleblower's account is the construction facility itself, jokingly dubbed “Atlantis” by older team members. When asked what it looked like, the poster provided surprising detail.

Q: What does it look like?

A: Shaped like an extremely large UFO but more of a “burger” design. Almost never leaves the Atlantic Ocean, in fact it will sit through hurricanes. No visible weapons or “cockpit” from sat footage. It also does not use any lights. The main construction facility does not rust or deteriorate from what we can tell.

The method of tracking this facility raised eyebrows:

Q: How do you track it?

A: We rely mostly on detecting the gravity it produces. It normally doesn't produce heat outright. When it does we believe it's in the process of construction since a small heat buildup can be detected when a craft returns or exits.

But the most chilling detail concerned what happens when humans get too close to the underwater “UFO Factory”

Q: What happens when you approach it?

A: The last unit we saw approach the facility didn't even have time to communicate they were being attacked before it was over. At one point we deployed fighters and a sub with serious intent. Everything except the sub was lost. This weapon destroys the matter it hits entirely. It also shits on anything electronic in the vicinity.

When craft return to this facility, heat signatures suggest they're smelted back down into component parts. This recycling operation explains why so few intact craft are ever recovered:

Q: Do the UAPs return to the manufacturing unit?

A: Yes, some come in and leave the planet but very rarely. Based on heat signatures likely smelted back down into parts. It feels more like a carrier but with construction capability.

The poster also suspects this may not be the only facility. With increasing attention on polar regions, he believes other units might exist, including one in the Arctic.

The Craft Themselves

The whistleblower's description of the craft challenges some popular UFO imagery while confirming others.

On shapes:

Q: What shapes have you seen?

A: Things like triangles and hard-edged squares don't exist. Pill shapes are extremely sought after, some we think are “freighters.” Cigar shaped are very rare, we were told finding one would be career changing.

The materials presented unique challenges:

Q: What are they made of?

A: An alloy that we cannot reproduce but only repurpose. This alloy is kind of like a “film” that fits over the frame of the craft. One of the main problems when repurposing these alloys is getting them hot enough. They absorb heat very well.

On the power source, the poster confirmed a name familiar to anyone who has followed UFO lore:

Q: What powers them?

A: The power source is E115. It produces its own gravity field. Bob Lazar handled E115 which was already pulled out which is rare and weird. Protocol now is that only one person is allowed to handle E115. We still have trouble producing this shit too.

When someone pointed out that Element 115 decays in milliseconds under lab conditions, the response was blunt:

Q: Element 115 nuclei lasts for milliseconds before disintegrating under lab conditions.

A: Correct. Still a massive problem.

The interiors matched what you might expect from craft not designed for human proportions:

Q: What does the interior look like?

A: Always cramped and hard to stand fully upright in. For reference I'm 5'8. There is almost never a storage facility unless dedicated to something for the craft. Tools are not freely placed around and have dedicated placement.

On stealth capabilities:

Q: Do they have stealth capabilities?

A: Maybe 1 in 20 has stealth technology. These crafts are so rare we actually almost never see them crash because we can't track them.

Types of UFO Lights and What They Mean

One of the most practical revelations concerned the meaning of different light colors observed on UFOs:

Q: What about the lights on craft?

A: Orange is a mineral/bio-scanning mode. Since most people see orange up close you're likely being scouted/selected for an abduction. It can see your heart beating and even the valves pushing the blood inside. Red lights are defense mode, the craft wants to leave and has to keep an eye on you. Red also allows very accurate calculation of distance and can detect hostility based on facial expression. If a weapon is fired the “beam” is white.

This color-coding system, if accurate, provides witnesses with a framework for understanding what they're experiencing during an encounter. Orange means you're being studied. Red means they want out. White means something is being destroyed.

The Occupants: “Earth’s Zookeepers”

The beings operating these craft match the classic “Gray” description:

Q: Are “aliens” human or humanoid?

A: Humanoid, very humanoid. They are smaller than humans and look like your typical “Gray” aliens. Holes for ears and they can look at very bright objects without being blinded. I've never seen one move their mouth.

On the question of gender:

Q: Are they male or female?

A: We haven't seen any females. We think it's mainly a military operation or they just don't have them hence male only.

When asked if a human could win a physical confrontation:

Q: Could a human physically best them?

A: I'm not an expert but probably. Their size and frame are one reason they don't make it through crashes often.

But the most memorable exchange came when someone asked what they think of us:

Q: What do they think of us?

A: One of the officials in charge said something that stuck with me: “They act like keepers of a zoo uninterested in the daily life of wildlife until there's a problem.” They cut their losses when crashes are recovered, same with personnel. Zoo keepers aren't friends with the animals.

When pressed on why they don't recover their dead or crashed craft:

Q: Why don't they recover their dead or crashed craft?

A: No idea. They cut their losses. Have any retarded cousins that destroy everything they touch? When do you want to see them again?

Abductions

The thread's discussion of abduction tools paints a disturbing picture that strips away any New Age romanticism about “star family” contact:

Q: What about abduction tools?

A: There are tools that induce a child-like state or something akin to having a stroke. Tools designed to take objects the size of pills and push them deep into your tissue and stomach, these tools aren't friendly and don't account for extreme pain. There's also a tool that looks like a circular battery designed for keeping your eyes open when deployed. It also stops the eye from moving almost perfectly.

Selection criteria for abductees followed a disturbing pattern:

Q: Do we know why certain individuals are selected for abduction?

A: They like picking from remote areas exposed to radiation or disease. They have a distinct fascination with radiation. When Fukushima happened the construction facility deployed multiple UFOs to the location over multiple weeks.

On the “orbs” commonly reported by witnesses:

Q: What about the “orbs” people see?

A: There are tools shaped like “hammers.” They emit extremely bright light and are used as a sort of drone or scout. They are able to view almost 360 degrees and detect everything from minerals to bio.

The Crash Recovery Process

The whistleblower claimed to work on “Team 2” of crash recovery operations:

Q: Walk through the process of a crash recovery?

A: First team deals with occupants and initial discovery. We arrive and meet with an external member who can touch and examine parts we are not allowed to interact with. We never have to cut our way into the UFO. First order of business is checking for E115 then leaving the ship to send it away. We return and look for any tools and loose objects that can be extracted. We then strip any specialized components, sensory equipment or navigation. A third and fourth team arrive to remove the bulk of the craft.

One haunting detail emerged about living occupants:

Q: What about living occupants?

A: One example was shortly after I joined, one was downed but two occupants were alive. The first team couldn't get close without being attacked. Aliens never seem to recover their lost UFOs so they just waited a few days until they died then recovered the UFO.

Government Structure & Secrecy

The organizational picture that emerged is one of extreme compartmentalization:

Q: What is the main body of government collecting information on UFOs?

A: It doesn't officially exist and I won't use the internal name on here either.

Q: Is the USAF kept in the dark?

A: The USAF is kept in the dark. We operated above them. A close coworker wondered if even the president knew, namely Trump because we both thought he would just tell everyone. I heard the phrase “Fuck Bill Clinton” thrown around regarding access to information. I'm pretty sure he asked.

On Space Force's role:

Q: What role will Space Force play?

A: Openly stated to us: discovery for internal use and disinformation to the public.

When asked why keep it secret:

Q: Why keep it secret?

A: Because most governments think the local population is stupid. They're not wrong. I do think the initial panic would be really bad, especially for religious communities.

But the whistleblower offered a surprisingly candid assessment about the state of secrecy:

Q: How have they maintained secrecy?

A: They haven't been able to maintain secrecy. That's a major reason the previous management didn't mind us being so open with each other. Now you know why I find references to MJ12 funny. Secrecy is all but gone, now it's just about obfuscation and misinformation.

Reverse Engineering: Who Has What?

The global picture painted a competitive landscape:

Q: What about other countries?

A: We used to laugh at Russian and Chinese designs. We stopped laughing at China when they produced an operational (but buggy) version of their mining equipment. Still stumps most of our engineers. Countries listed above have flight-capable craft, just not very good ones. China still scares us.

On American reverse engineering efforts:

Q: Have we created our own craft?

A: Modifying them to fire human weapons is a big thing. Generally trying to test and research ways to reduce inertia. Yes, we've taken them out of atmosphere a lot.

Commercial applications have already filtered into everyday life:

Q: Is tech from these craft used commercially?

A: A lot of your stealth aircraft sport smoother designs. Learning to track them helped with targeting software. Laser technology comes to mind since it's a crippled version of what they use. Lasers, you see lasers everywhere even in retail.

The poster implied Lockheed Martin's involvement with characteristic sarcasm:

Q: Is Lockheed Martin involved?

A: Such a great company, aren't they? Definitely wouldn't be the type to try to leak things to the public.

UFO Mining Operations

A consistent thread throughout the discussion: these beings mine Earth's resources.

Q: What are they mining?

A: They consistently mine gold. The last miner we looked at had a huge haul of gold, iron and silver. No dirt. Mining quite literally takes the resource out of the rock without leaving much dirt.

This mining operation provides a pragmatic answer to the “why are they here?” question that avoids both the messianic (they're here to save us) and the paranoid (they're here to harvest us). They're simply extracting resources while maintaining the planet's habitability. Zookeepers ensuring the enclosure remains functional.

2002: The Year Everything Changed

When asked about significant years, the whistleblower repeatedly emphasized 2002:

Q: Why was 2002 a big year?

A: A lot of activities and changes in operation both for them and us. A lot of secrecy issues surfaced that year as a result. Funding also jumped through the roof.

When pressed for specifics, they mentioned the Eric Davis memo (the alleged Wilson-Davis documents) and suggested the third page's date was “interesting.”

For UFO researchers, 2002 sits in an odd gap, after the initial post-9/11 chaos but before the modern UAP disclosure movement. What happened that year to cause such upheaval remains unexplained, but the whistleblower clearly considered it pivotal.

Nuclear Concerns

The beings' relationship with nuclear weapons emerged as a major theme:

Q: Has any form of communication been established?

A: Yes. They mostly want very little to do with us until we start to talk about war and nuclear options. It's one of the reasons why you see them so often at critical events. It's hard to get them to respond to us in general.

Q: Does this happen often with nukes?

A: About once every 10 years for the US. A higher-up joked months after the last one I saw that “The phone rings everywhere but the president's office.”

When asked why they didn't prevent Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

Q: If they interfere when there is a nuclear threat why didn't they prevent the WW2 nukes?

A: We never came to a solid conclusion other than they may not have realized our capability until we used them. They were interested in test sites but never actually stopped the ones we set off.

On their apparent objectives:

Q: What's their objective?

A: I agree they are here to observe and preserve. The idea was pitched that they are waiting for us to mature or perhaps something bigger to arrive and they don't want us to ruin the planet in the meantime.

Q: Why don't they just destroy us?

A: They could absolutely destroy us if they wanted to. They have started launch sequences before that we suspect were tests on “what they are dealing with.” My personal view is they have to stay out of our way but keep us from destroying ourselves.

The Interface Technology

One of the more science-fiction elements: the beings' computer technology.

Q: Are they aware of computer tech?

A: They know about ours yes. I doubt they could operate ours with our input devices though. Describing their version of a console/computer is really hard. It works by holding it and thinking about what you want. If you are distracted even slightly it goes to shit.

This thought-controlled interface suggests a level of technology that operates on principles entirely foreign to human computing, more akin to telepathy than programming.

Personal Revelations

Throughout both threads, the whistleblower shared personal details that either humanized them or (depending on your perspective) added to an elaborate character construction.

On motivation:

Q: Why are you doing this?

A: Yes, liver cancer sucks. I'm not going on national TV or radio. I'm on a 4chan board. Cancer makes you feel a little different.

On faith:

Q: Do you still believe in God?

A: Absolutely not.

On whether we might be their creation:

Q: Do you think we are their creation/experiment?

A: We both look very similar. It wouldn't surprise me and I'm inclined to think so.

On the dead man's switch:

Q: Is there a dead man's switch?

A: There is a lockbox that I've asked to be opened after my death. Hopefully part of that makes it to this board as I've instructed.

And in one of the thread's most human moments:

“It has a weird way of making you appreciate everything. I actually taste the water I drink now if that even makes sense. Appreciate it though, I'm pretty fucked.”

What They Wouldn't Answer

Equally telling is what the whistleblower refused to discuss:

• Specific department name
• Their educational background
• Facility locations
• Detailed reporting structure
• The Varginha, Brazil incident (“seems far out there”)
• Antarctica connections (mentioned briefly, then avoided)
• Highly specific technical questions (accused questioners of “samefagging”)

These omissions could indicate operational security concerns, holes in an invented story, or simple unfamiliarity with topics outside their claimed expertise.

Assessment: LARP or Leak?

Any honest analysis must acknowledge we cannot verify these claims. Anonymous posts on 4chan carry zero inherent credibility. The forum is famous for elaborate hoaxes, and “insider knowledge” threads appear regularly.

However, several elements distinguish this particular posting:

Factors suggesting authenticity:

• Unusual internal consistency across hundreds of questions
• Details that align with other alleged disclosures (Element 115, gravity propulsion, Gray descriptions)
• Pragmatic, almost boring explanations rather than sensationalist claims
• Acknowledged limitations of knowledge rather than claiming omniscience
• Willingness to say “I don't know” frequently
• Emotional elements (cancer, marriage strain) that humanize without melodrama
• Specific operational details about crash recovery protocols
• The “zookeeper” framing, original and consistent throughout

Factors suggesting fabrication:

• Anonymous forum with no verification possible
• Convenient inability to provide proof “yet”
• Some answers feel evasive or circular
• Terminal illness creates urgency that explains lack of documentation
• Sophisticated LARP creators can maintain consistency
• No subsequent verification of the “lockbox” claim

The threads are best understood as highly detailed modern UFO folklore. They may contain truth, distortion, deliberate disinformation, pure invention, or all of the above, mixed together in a way no one can untangle from the outside.

Why This Whistleblower Sticks

Despite the lack of proof, the 2023 4chan whistleblower has stuck in the collective UFO conversation for a few reasons:

1. It is comprehensive. It offers a full “model of reality”: drones, factories, grays, mining, nuclear oversight, reverse engineering, and geopolitical angles.

2. It meshes with existing lore. Element 115, gray aliens, UFOs around nukes, deep ocean mysteries, and a government above the Air Force all slot neatly into familiar narratives.

3. It feels grounded but not polished. The tone is closer to a tired coworker venting than a media-trained witness. That informality makes it feel more authentic to some readers.

4. The human angle lands. A dying insider dropping secrets to a dying imageboard has a certain grim symmetry, whether you believe him or not.

The Bigger Picture

Regardless of authenticity, these threads articulate a coherent worldview that differs from mainstream UFO mythology in important ways:

1. Industrial rather than mystical. No spiritual evolution, no galactic councils. Just manufacturing, mining, and monitoring.

2. Indifferent rather than interested. These beings aren't here to help humanity ascend or harvest our souls. They're maintaining an asset (Earth) and its resources (including us, perhaps).

3. Pragmatic rather than paranoid. Government secrecy isn't about preventing panic or protecting power. It's simply about managing something they don't fully understand while preventing adversaries from gaining advantages.

4. Continuous rather than episodic. Not crashed saucers from distant stars making occasional visits, but a permanent, industrial presence operating for centuries.

This framework feels almost disappointingly mundane, which may be precisely why some find it credible. The truth, if this is it, isn't dramatic. It's just... ongoing.

Where Are They Now?

The whistleblower stopped posting after approximately two weeks, citing the toll of chemotherapy and frustration with off-topic responses. They left with a promise: the lockbox, instructions, and potential future proof.

As of this writing, no such follow-up has emerged. Whether that means the poster survived longer than expected, decided against disclosure, was fabricating from the start, or simply hasn't died yet, we cannot know.

What remains is this: two archived threads, hundreds of questions, and one of the most detailed accounts of alleged UFO program involvement ever posted online. Too detailed to ignore, too unsupported to accept outright. Whether they eventually look like early disclosure, an elaborate roleplay, or something stranger, they have already done their work, reshaping how many people on the internet imagine the UFO problem.

Read the Original Threads

For those wanting to examine the primary sources:

• Thread 1 – April 24, 2023
• Thread 2 – May 4, 2023

What do you think? Genuine insider or elaborate larp?

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GO HOOSIERS!

Tonight I have an NCAA women's basketball game to follow. The Western Michigan Broncos will come down to Bloomington's Assembly Hall to play the Indiana Hoosiers. Opening tip is scheduled for 17:00 local time. I've already tuned into The Home for IU Women's Basketball where I intend to follow the radio call of the game.

And the adventure does continue.