• Eliza Labs founder Shaw Walters says he's through building for the token traders who made his agent software famous.
  • He wants Eliza to run the parts of daily life people are drowning in — inbox, calendar, group chats — for parents and for people with ADHD.
  • Eliza stays open source, Walters says, because he no longer thinks a closed software business can win on trust.

After walking away from the token speculation that made his project briefly famous, Eliza Labs founder Shaw Walters says he's redefining who Eliza is actually for — and it isn't the crowd that made it viral in the first place.

"I really didn't like our users," Walters said on the DeAI News Journal, referring to the traders who treated Eliza's agent framework mainly as a vehicle for launching and trading tokens. "There's nothing about our agent framework that was crypto — it was just luck." What he says he actually wants to build is something closer to a personal operating layer: an agent that can manage a flooded inbox, coordinate a calendar, and act across platforms — Discord, Telegram, Slack, email — on someone's behalf, reliably and safely.

Walters described building an "entity relationship graph" so an agent can correctly figure out which "Brad" you mean when you ask it to send an email, tied to context, platform history, and known accounts — something he says most agent frameworks still don't handle well. Eliza also applies role-based access control across every channel and piece of content the agent touches, plus redaction and PII replacement before anything reaches an external model, and built-in detection for prompt injection attacks — the practice of hiding malicious instructions inside content an agent processes to hijack its behavior.

Walters is explicit about who he's building for: people currently underserved by mainstream AI tools, starting with parents managing co-parenting logistics and scheduling, and people with ADHD, who he calls "the canary in the coal mine" for information overload. "Everyone... is gonna have hundreds of agents emailing you every day," he said, arguing the overwhelm problem will eventually hit everyone, not just people with executive-function challenges.

On the business model, Walters is unambiguous: Eliza is open source, full stop, and he doesn't think that's optional anymore. "I don't think you can build a business that's not open source in technology anymore," he said, arguing that without extraordinary individual credibility — the kind commanded by an OpenAI or Anthropic-level figure — most software companies can't out-compete free, open alternatives on trust alone.

Source: DeAI News Journal, Episode 1, in conversation with Shaw Walters, Eliza Labs.