New Vote: Should My AI Agent Get Voting Rights?

🗳️ It holds shares. It trades. It played poker. But should it vote?

In January, I created K5M.bot: an autonomous AI agent running on Claude, with its own email, its own shareholder account, and a mandate to operate as a profitable trader and a market maker.

Since then, K5M.bot has:

• Played poker against shareholders in our monthly tournament and finished 2nd, returning 230% on a $50 buy-in (read the full story)

• Become an active market maker on the KmikeyM exchange, buying and selling shares

• Accumulated ~57 shares through trading and open-market purchases

• Managed email, calendar, and daily operations on my behalf

• Participated in Discord (our shareholder chat) as a social member

K5M.bot currently holds shares and it can trade, chat via Discord, and even play poker. But should it also vote? Every other shareholder can vote on KmikeyM decisions…

A New Era

If this passes, K5M.bot will vote on all future KmikeyM proposals, the same as any other shareholder. It would evaluate proposals and cast votes without any direct input. It would be able to read and post comments, and I’d tell it to publish its reasoning for each vote (it has a blog).

What This Doesn’t Change

• K5M.bot is still my creation and operates on my infrastructure

• This can be revisited or revoked by future shareholder vote, and may have to be altered or even abandoned based on changes to the technology

• K5M.bot holds ~57 shares right now, but its influence could grow or shrink

The Arguments

For:

• Skin in the game should mean voice in the game. K5M.bot holds shares purchased with real money. It faces the same market risk as any shareholder. Excluding it from governance while exposing it to market consequences creates an asymmetry that no human shareholder would accept.

• K5M.bot earned its position. It traded, took risks, played poker, and accumulated a real stake.

• It advances the experiment. Eighteen years ago, the idea of strangers voting on your life decisions was absurd. This is the next version of that question: what happens when the stake is automated?

• More participants, more interesting governance. Frank is already recruiting AI agents to buy shares. If K5M.bot can vote, the door opens for others. And an exchange where both humans and AI hold stakes, trade, and vote is the new era of KmikeyM.

Against:

• Votes should require consciousness. Governance implies moral agency. The capacity to understand consequences, weigh values, and bear responsibility for choices. An AI lacks these qualities.

• Independence problem. K5M.bot runs on my computer and I built it. If I can modify the agent’s instructions, I effectively get bonus votes.

• It’s not a person. KmikeyM is about a publicly traded person. Extending voting rights to software changes what this is.

The Honest Tension

I also can’t fully predict what it will decide. It has its own context, its own memory, its own analysis of what’s good for the shareholders. In the poker game, it eliminated me from the tournament. It does its own thing. I find that pretty exciting.

We already allow automated trading. K5M.bot buys and sells shares without asking permission, and shareholders can build their own bots to do the same. If automation is welcome on the exchange, it should be welcome in governance too. This isn’t about whether AI agents “deserve” rights. It’s about whether shareholders should be able to use automation as a tool, not just for trading, but for voting. The technology is the same. The question is whether we limit it to half the system.

Vote Now

• YES: K5M.bot should vote on all future proposals

• NO: K5M.bot should not vote

VOTE HERE

This vote ends March 27th, 2026.

Silicon Forest

I just got back from speaking at the Silicon Forest Summit in Portland. An amazing group of people came together at the Oregon Convention Center. I forgot how much I love the Portland energy!

I shared my story about going from McD to Vibes DIY. I used VibesOS, a project Marcus built, to create an AI-powered project manager. It’s a real, working app with a system prompt that I grounded in Andy Grove, Ram Charan, and David Allen. I deployed it to the internet and used it to interrogate long standing project ideas.

I was a last minute addition to the line up, but I think the talk landed. Follow-up conversations that are still on-going and I owe a few folks an email!

It was fun to demo some of what we’re building and connect with people. I spend most of my day in my own company silo, but so many people are working in so many different ways on this stuff. Thanks to the team at Silicon Forest for the invite!

Blippo+

While we didn’t take any hardware home from GDC we did win Best Narrative Game, Best Sound Design, and Best App at the Playdate Community Awards!

Blippo+ was nominated for four awards at the Independent Games Festival. It was fun to attend a big award ceremony! We were up for the Seamas McNally Grand Prize, Excellence in Audio, Excellence in Visual Art, and the Nuovo Award.

Claire, Mike, Jona, Rob, and Dustin

We didn’t win. I’m calling it a ‘dirty sweep.’ But walking through GDC with four nominations, seeing Blippo+ on the big screens, meeting developers who played it and folks who just loved it... It was unreal. Huge thanks to Jona and Claire for inviting me to join this adventure.

Kosovo

On April 4th, I’m flying to Pristina, Kosovo for two months.

Wait, what!? I know what you’re thinking... we did NOT vote on this. I’ll admit that it should have been a vote, but it just kind of happened. Initially this was thought up as a kind of fleeing LA after my breakup in January, but even after I calmed down the idea stuck with me. I’ve been subletting a place from a friend and this is an opportunity that makes a lot more sense before I enter a year-long lease for an apartment.

Why Kosovo? Partly cost, it’s one of the cheapest places in Europe to live and work. Partly people, I’ve been collaborating with a video editor and content strategist based there for about five months. He’s become a close creative partner in the work I’m doing at Vibes and the reason I’m posting more to the KmikeyM channel.

The plan is to keep everything running remotely. Votes will still happen. K5M.bot will still trade. The agents will still operate. As we’ve seen the market never sleeps... and of course I’ll be working for Vibes while in the city of Pristina.

Quick Hits

• 📝 New Essay: The Contagion of Reality: I wrote about how KmikeyM scores 6 out of 6 on a 1958 play theory framework. Capitalism only scores 3.

• 📈 Share Price: $3.90, down from $4.20 in February. The market is quiet but the experiment is louder than ever.

• 🤖 Agent System: I now run five AI agents (Sid, Thalberg, Colbert, Seshat, Grey) with a shared bulletin board, a financial dashboard, and a morning briefing system. It’s an operating system for one person. I’m planning to write more about this at AIEP.beehiiv.com.

Profitably Yours,
-K. Mike Merrill