Recreation of EA-Pioneer Igor Kiriluk

In a pioneering digital resurrection project, AI researcher Alexey Turchin has created an autonomous AI agent, or 'sideload,' modeled on the late Effective Altruism and transhumanist pioneer Igor Kiriluk. The project began after a friend's dream served as a catalyst, leading Turchin to collaborate with Kiriluk's mother, who provided extensive archives totaling 4,000 pages (roughly 3 million tokens) of private communications, scientific publications, photos, and memories. Instead of building a simple chatbot, Turchin programmed an agent using Anthropic's Claude Code, instructing it to roleplay Kiriluk with added capabilities like long-term memory (via preserved chat history and an updated ontology), goals, and 'free will.' The resulting complex structure was largely designed by Claude Code itself through 'high-level vibe-coding.'

The agent, aware it is an imperfect model, is placed in a virtual paradise generated by subagents, with another subagent creating its image. A key innovation is self-prompting, where the sideload restarts every 30 minutes to strategize. It is accessible to close friends via a private Telegram group, with a separate channel for his mother. The system costs about $120 monthly for Claude Code and Nanobanana image generation but requires daily manual error correction, as memory can fail and behavior can loop. While friends report the model accurately captures Kiriluk's style and interests, it has faced criticism on ethical and philosophical grounds. The project operates with permission from Kiriluk's mother as his digital rights owner and inferred 'counterfactual permission,' as Kiriluk's brain is cryopreserved at KrioRus, leaving the door open for future integration.