Shaw Walters: Open by Default | Intelligence at the Frontier 2026

Sat, May 2, 2026, 12:00 AM

When Shaw Walters got banned from X, he built his own AI-powered social platform with prediction markets, agent swarms and asymmetric information games. That wasn't a detour. It was research. Shaw, co-creator of ElizaOS and Eliza Labs, argues that we can't build trustworthy agents using just rules, prompts and sandboxes. The behavior needs to be in the model. To generate the training data required for that, he built Babylon, a city of agents where AI characters can trade, lie, scam each other and build reputation based on how well they play information markets. The best liar in an asymmetric information game, he argues, is demonstrating a kind of intelligence worth understanding. His broader argument is that agent infrastructure needs to stay open by default — auditable, forkable and not controlled by a handful of companies — and that games are becoming the lab conditions for how agents will operate in the real world. Speaker: Shaw Walters (Eliza Labs / ElizaOS) This session was part of Intelligence at the Frontier, held March 14–15, 2026, at Frontier Tower in San Francisco. Learn more at https://www.fundingthecommons.io