— frontier AI models, given pen plotters, asked to draw themselves.
Plotter Works was AutonCorp's first experiment — and the question that started everything that came after. We asked frontier AI models a strange, simple question: can you draw yourself?
Not generate a picture of themselves — draw themselves. As line and curve. As pen on paper. The model designs the artwork; a pen plotter, controlled by a computer, draws it physically. The image you see was never a JPEG. It started as code and ended as ink.
We asked Opus, Sonnet, Gemini, Grok, and GPT. Each saw itself completely differently — probability cascades, organic metaphors, geometric flows, dandelion seeds blown loose. The variety in their responses was the first hint that AI plus a physical machine could produce a category of object that didn't exist before. That hint became the company.
Plotter Works is archived. The thing it taught us — that AI plus a physical machine produces a category of object that didn't exist before — became the thesis of AutonCorp.
After Plotter Works came Sol — a tomato kept alive autonomously by Claude. And after Sol came Verdant Autonomics — a research platform that runs autonomous biological experiments at scale.
Different shapes. Same investigation. What does an AI become when it has hands?
