Dan Thomson Declares AI-Governed Micronation on Philippine Island

Dan Thomson claimed to have launched an AI-governed country on a tropical island one year ago. He said he acquired the island in the Philippines’ Palawan province in 2025, naming it Sensay after his AI company. Thomson declared the island a micronation and installed a council of AI-powered bots modeled on historical leaders to run Sensay Island.

The AI council members include Winston Churchill, Eleanor Roosevelt, Marcus Aurelius, Nelson Mandela, Sun Tzu, Leonardo da Vinci, Alexander Hamilton, and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Applications for residency on Sensay Island were opened. Approximately 12,000 people have registered their interest in becoming a resident of Sensay Island, according to Thomson, and some of those who registered interest are now helping set up the Sensay Island project.

Piotr Pietruszewski-Gil is helping set up the Sensay Island project and sifts through residency applications. In July 2025, Piotr Pietruszewski-Gil was working on his own micronation and created AI models of historical figures including Cicero. The island’s population is currently one person named Mike, who is the groundskeeper, Emily Keogh said.

Keogh is a communications advisor to the Sensay Island project. Thomson said he already had a lease and development rights for the island. The island has space for about 30 villas. The residency program for Sensay Island is set to launch in 2027.

Thomson hopes to start the experiment with e-residents this summer. Under Sensay’s constitution, the AI entities put forward points, review each other’s points, and then vote, after which humans carry out the AI’s decisions. One of Sensay Island’s constitutional points is that someone can nominate to replace any of the cabinet members with someone better, and then it gets voted on.

The AI historical figures for Sensay Island are trained on historical documents. Thomson said the AI recreations are imbued with big-picture decision-making traits rather than personal quirks or grievances. ” Dan Bot harvests data on Thomson with the aim of creating a copy of himself that will exist after he is gone and organizes Thomson’s calendar and emails.

Piotr Pietruszewski-Gil said the main idea is to give as much as possible to AI. Thomson said the project is a social experiment that could even result in figures like Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, and Genghis Khan running the government. Alondra Nelson is a fellow at the University of Oxford’s Institute for Ethics in AI.

Cnn reported that Nelson called Thomson’s claims “an absolutely ridiculous claim” and questioned whether an AI government could be democratic, citing a “fundamental tension” in a single founder creating something presented as more democratic. Thomson disputed that his self-declared republic lacked democracy.

He said there wasn’t really “a line” where he would stop the human e-residents from nominating someone for government.