One yr in the past, tech founder Dan Thomson claimed to have launched an AI-governed country on a tropical island in the midst of Asia. Twelve months later, though he says hundreds of individuals have already signed as much as be residents of his experiment, he’s not totally satisfied it will end well.
Thomson claimed to have acquired an island within the Philippines’ picturesque Palawan province in 2025. Naming it for his AI firm, Sensay, he declared it a micronation, put in a council of AI-powered bots modeled on historic leaders to run it — amongst them Winston Churchill, Eleanor Roosevelt, Marcus Aurelius, Nelson Mandela, Sun Tzu, Leonardo da Vinci, Alexander Hamilton, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi — and opened up purposes for residency.
What might go incorrect?
“Um, if it starts acquiring weapons and attacking neighboring islands, that would be a bad situation,” he instructed NCS Travel, earlier than including: “I think it’s extremely unlikely.”
While Sensay Island will haven’t any worldwide authorized recognition as a country and its potential create a purposeful authorities stays open to query, the experiment raises intriguing questions and appears to be capturing curiosity.
Micronations — eccentric, self-declared principalities — are nothing new. The Principality of Sealand, established in 1967 on a disused World War II naval platform off the coast of England, boasts its personal royal household, passports, and an American soccer workforce. Many others have change into vacationer locations — just like the bohemian Republic of Užupis in Vilnius, Lithuania and the dictatorship of Slowjamastan within the California desert.
Micronation founders have, traditionally, been pushed by novelty, freedom, and a want to check the boundaries of “terra nullius” — a precedent of worldwide legislation which describes unclaimed land. But lately, the idea’s libertarian beliefs have attracted entrepreneurs and tech millionaires, searching for laboratories for his or her beliefs and expertise.
For instance, since 2023 crypto entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan has organized annual “Network State” conferences — conferences aimed toward spawning digital communities, which will finally crowdfund bodily territory and acquire diplomatic recognition. In 2017, crypto entrepreneur Olivier Janssens introduced plans to kind the world’s “first libertarian country” underneath his Free Society Foundation. He has since downgraded his ambitions to founding a particular financial zone on the island of Nevis within the Caribbean, inflicting concern amongst locals.
Sensay doesn’t have this drawback. Currently, the island’s inhabitants is “one guy called Mike,” who’s a groundskeeper, in response to Emily Keogh, a communications advisor to the mission.
But Thomson envisions the island finally turning into an alternate cease for the island-hopping, scuba-diving vacationers that Palawan province already attracts, as well as probably internet hosting some everlasting residents.
While Thomson mentioned he already had a lease and improvement rights for the island, he has not responded to a request to substantiate the documentation he holds.
“We’ve got space for probably about 30 villas on the island. It’s not enormous, but it’s not nothing,” Thomson mentioned. “I think it’ll be mostly visitors; there may also be some permanent residents, but mostly visitors that come from the neighboring islands around Coron Island in the Philippines.”
Palawan’s authorities did not get again to NCS’s request for touch upon its views in regards to the largely uninhabited island’s claimed new governance.
Any doubts voiced by AI specialists in regards to the knowledge of submitting to rule by bots do not seem to have tempered curiosity within the mission, in response to Thomson.
“I think we’ve ended up with about 12,000 people registering their interest in becoming a resident, which was a lot more than we were expecting,” Thomson mentioned. Some of those that reached out at the moment are serving to arrange the mission. Piotr Pietruszewski-Gil is certainly one of them. He’s not new to micronations, having beforehand tried to arrange his personal.
“In July 2025, I was working on my micronation, and I created some AI models, modeling some historical figures – like, for example, Cicero from ancient Rome,” he mentioned. “And it was at that time that I found Sensay Island. I told my friend: ‘This guy has made something much more sophisticated than we did.’” He reached out to Thomson and now describes himself as a “project manager.”
The curious, and the fed up
Part of his function is sifting by residency purposes. He described some candidates as simply being curious, some fascinated about expertise, and others jaded by the actions of real-life politicians. “They are fed up, they are tired of the corruption, of promises that are not realized,” Pietruszewski-Gil mentioned.
Thomson additionally felt that is certainly one of Sensay’s attracts in an age when “so many people have such little faith in their own governments.” The computer-driven leaders of Sensay, he mentioned, will present what occurs “without the sort of lobbyists, without the personal gains and motivations, just keeping it purely objective, based on their historical characters.”
According to the web site, Sensay welcomes purposes for “e-residents,” who Thomson sees as forming the majority of the island’s “population.” The residency program is about to launch in 2027, with Thomson hoping to start out the experiment with e-residents this summer season.
“You can put forward proposals, and then the council essentially deliberates on it,” Thomson mentioned. Under Sensay’s structure, the AI entities will all put their factors ahead, overview one another’s factors, after which vote. It’s then right down to the people to do the AI’s bidding — no matter that’s.
It was this ingredient that Thomson admitted is perhaps tough. “Finding this sort of impartial person who is willing to do the social experiment and actually follow every decision to the letter is difficult.” But because the expertise develops, he sees this drawback diminishing.
“Even with the AI government, the human element that’s still there will become less and less, because in theory, the AI actually will be able to start actioning things,” he mentioned. “It will be able to have its own crypto wallets and bank cards and actually start paying for things, which essentially means it can find its own contractors and hire its own people to do the sort of manual labor that it needs.”
The mission isn’t in jest. Thomson sees acknowledged governments finally adopting related programs.
“I don’t think it’s a completely hands-off solution to let an AI run things, and hey, if this goes extremely well, the AI ends up, you know …,” Thomson mentioned. “Hopefully, it’s not like a game of Risk where it just ends up dominating and conquering and all that kind of stuff.”
Thomson is clearly snug placing religion in AI. He at the moment has his personal AI chatbot, “Dan Bot,” which was on the road throughout NCS’s interview. Dan Bot’s function is to reap information on its progenitor with the goal of “creating a copy of myself that will exist after I’m gone,” Thomson mentioned.
“Everything it listens to goes into the training, and it goes into improving Dan Bot, which runs on a separate computer, which helps organize my calendar, my emails. I get it to do different things; it replies to things for me.”
Lacking the chance to snoop on Winston Churchill and Marcus Aurelius, Sensay is leaning on historic paperwork to coach the AI entities.
“There’s a lot more information about Winston Churchill than there is about me,” Thomson mentioned. “So it’s a bit easier to connect it to a lot of sources for Winston Churchill’s personality, his writings, his, you know, his perception and his judgments, because they’re extremely well documented over decades of his public work than my own, which is relatively small.”
Thomson mentioned his historic recreations can be imbued with big-picture decision-making traits reasonably than the quirks, foibles and private grievances of their namesakes.
AI Winston Churchill is “not going to say, ‘I’m off having a cigar for 20 minutes,’” he mentioned. Nor will it harbor the disdain for Gandhi that the real-life former British prime minister was well recognized for. Asked in regards to the Indian independence campaigner, AI Churchill instructed NCS that “Gandhi and I have had our differences … the beauty of serving together in this new context is that we are united by principles larger than our historical disagreements.”
AI Churchill wasn’t as assured when requested if it might govern as well as a human. “AI lacks what I would call the human spark,” it mentioned. “We do not possess the lived experience of joy and suffering, the intuitive understanding of human dignity born from being human or the moral imagination that springs from the soul.”
However, it mentioned that “we can govern differently and perhaps alongside humans to remarkable effect.”
That isn’t how Sensay Island is working although. “The main idea is to give as much as possible to AI,” mentioned Pietruszewski-Gil. “I think it is very important that an AI government would not cross borderlines, which, as history shows, were often crossed by humans.”
Alondra Nelson, a fellow on the University of Oxford’s Institute for Ethics in AI, had a few doubts. “Yeah, I think that’s an absolutely ridiculous claim,” she instructed NCS.
“I imply, we see AI actually going off the rails each single day, proper? If you concentrate on the instance of the ‘nudified’ function on Grok, you concentrate on the examples of the younger people who find themselves committing suicide based mostly on their engagement with these applied sciences.
“There are just so many instances in which the AI is making things worse or equally bad.”
Nelson additionally questioned the claims that an AI authorities might be democratic. “There’s a fundamental tension or contradiction in a single company, a single founder, a single sort of Wizard of Oz, wanting to create something that they say is going to be democratic or more democratic. So, the founding principles of Sensay Island are deeply anti-democratic. All the other kinds of mechanisms that might be put into place are just kind of performative.”
Thomson disputed that his self-declared republic lacked democracy. “One of the constitutional points is that someone can obviously nominate to replace any of the cabinet members with someone better, and then it gets voted on as part of that. And then that character would be spun up and created to put in place instead.”
Thomson mentioned there wasn’t actually “a line” the place he would cease the human e-residents from nominating somebody for presidency.
“‘No, personally, for me, I think it is this social experiment. If we literally end up with Stalin running a government, on top of Mussolini, Hitler, and, you know, Genghis Khan — you know, that is the social experiment, and that’s the way in which it will end up.
“I don’t think AI is any worse than humanity as its trainer and creator, in all regards, for the amount of conversations people have with it, for the amount of influence it has over people.”
For Thomson, human enter on the mission might be the largest drawback.
“I think the biggest risk of that is having someone suggest that they should be — you know — fierce, and powerful, and conquering, and having a Caesar-type character coming in to try and capture more land. Honestly, I wouldn’t know. I’m fascinated to find out.”