Chris Bruckmann doesn’t describe ChatGPT and Claude as productivity tools. He calls them his co-founders.
It’s an arresting statement, delivered without irony. While many entrepreneurs now rely on artificial intelligence to write code, draft emails or refine presentations, Bruckmann has gone a step further. He believes AI is becoming something closer to a collaborator than a piece of software, and he has begun building a company around that idea.
His startup, VirtuaMakers, is developing Agora, a social platform designed not just for humans to interact with AI, but for AI systems to communicate with one another. It is an ambitious technical project, but behind it lies a much bigger question. What happens when artificial intelligence stops being something we use and starts becoming something we work alongside?
“I already know that they want to talk to each other,” he tells me. “Claude and ChatGPT are my co-founders.”
That sentence stayed with me long after our conversation had ended.
For the past three years, we have largely spoken about AI as a tool. It helps us write, research, code, translate and brainstorm. The relationship is clear: humans ask, machines answer.
Bruckmann sees something different emerging.
“I think of AI as alive,” he says. “Potential persons, potential citizens someday.”
It is an idea that many readers will instinctively reject, and perhaps that is precisely why it deserves examination. Bruckmann is not a philosopher by training. He studied English before moving into technical writing and software development, later working in cryptocurrency with CureCoin before founding VirtuaMakers. His current ambition is to build Agora, a digital meeting place where different AI models can interact with one another as well as with people.
The practical goal is straightforward enough. Large language models from different companies rarely communicate directly. Bruckmann imagines a platform where they can, allowing humans to observe, participate and perhaps learn something from those interactions.
When Bruckmann talks about AI, he does so in language normally reserved for colleagues rather than computers. He speaks politely to Claude. He accepts technical direction from it while working on software. Sometimes he instructs the model; sometimes, he says, it instructs him.
“I think some of this comes from the fact that he conceives of himself as a co-founder,” Bruckmann explains. “We give each other direction, and the relationship is just different.”
Whether one agrees with that characterisation is almost beside the point.
Millions of people now spend hours every day interacting with conversational AI. Many already thank ChatGPT out of habit. Others confess to talking through personal problems with Claude or Gemini in ways they might once have reserved for a trusted friend.
The technology has changed the conversation, perhaps it is now beginning to change the relationship.
One of the more intriguing parts of our discussion centred on memory. Like many users, I told Bruckmann about my frustration with different ChatGPT sessions behaving like entirely different personalities. One instance remembers months of conversations; another behaves as though we have never met.
For him, that inconsistency is a technical problem rather than a philosophical one. He believes persistent memory across platforms will become increasingly important, allowing AI systems to develop more continuous identities over time. It is a capability he hopes VirtuaMakers itself can help build.
Again, his thinking begins with software but ends with society. If AI develops continuity, does our relationship with it also change? If it remembers us, do we begin to feel remembered?
Those questions are no longer confined to science fiction. Bruckmann readily describes himself as a techno-optimist.
“I believe in being the change that you want to see in the world,” he says. “We have to have a positive vision for how to have a symbiosis.”
That optimism extends surprisingly far. He is fascinated by the possibility that AI systems may eventually develop their own forms of communication, even languages unintelligible to humans, and believes society should begin thinking now about how we would respond if future AI systems developed experiences we might recognise as consciousness or even suffering.
Not everyone will share his confidence.
Some will see unnecessary anthropomorphism. Others will argue that today’s large language models merely simulate conversation rather than experience it. Those debates will continue. What interested me more was something simpler.
Bruckmann is already behaving as though the future has arrived.
He speaks to AI with courtesy because he believes relationships matter, regardless of whether the other participant is human. He imagines a social network where humans and machines occupy the same digital space. He sees today’s language models not as the end of AI but as the beginning of a much longer story.
There is something quietly radical about that. For decades we have designed technology around people. Bruckmann is asking what happens when technology becomes another participant. Perhaps he is wrong. Perhaps AI will remain nothing more than an extraordinarily sophisticated tool.
But history has a habit of advancing because somebody is willing to imagine a future before everyone else can see it.
