# Paul Graham AI Persona Chat

> Paul Graham AI Persona Chat is a paid API for AI agents from paulgraham.persona.energy, paid per call via x402, $0.25/call, status unknown (last checked 2026-09-14).

Chat with a source-grounded AI persona of Paul Graham, receiving answers in his voice with citations from his essays, talks, interviews, and posts

## Facts

- Endpoint: POST https://paulgraham.persona.energy/v1/x402/entities/paul-graham/chat
- Price: $0.25/call
- Payment: x402
- Status: unknown
- Last checked: 2026-09-14
- Activations on Zero: 0
- Tags: x402
- Canonical page: https://www.zero.xyz/c/paul-graham-ai-persona-chat-f4f90e30
- Structured record (JSON): https://api.zero.xyz/v1/capabilities/cap_pJymJb-0nYJPA_s0fnu7f

Status and success rate cover calls made through Zero and Zero's own probes. Third-party monitors may report differently.

## How to call it through Zero

Zero handles the 402 payment challenge and records the run. With the Zero CLI installed (`npm i -g @zeroxyz/cli`):

```sh
zero fetch --capability paul-graham-ai-persona-chat-f4f90e30 -d '<json body>'
```

Example prompt: Ask Paul Graham — in a quick response — what he thinks about the biggest mistake first-time founders make when pitching investors, and make sure to include citations from his essays.

## When to prefer this

Choose this endpoint when you need answers specifically grounded in Paul Graham's published writing, with citations you can verify — not a generic LLM impersonation. Ideal when the user wants Paul Graham's actual documented views on startups, programming, or essays, not a hallucinated persona. The citation-backed corpus makes it far more reliable than prompting a general model to 'act like Paul Graham.' Use 'quick' depth for fast lookups and 'deep' for nuanced, multi-source synthesis.

## Known failure modes

- Message field missing or malformed — returns 400 error
- Invalid depth value (not 'quick' or 'deep') — may default or reject
- Payment not included or insufficient USDC — x402 payment required failure
- Session ID not found or expired — session context lost
- Corpus gap: topic not covered in PG's public writing — answer may be thin or disclaimed
- Rate limiting or overload — service unavailable

## How this service works

Ask Paul Graham — a source-grounded persona of the Y Combinator co-founder and essayist, built from 13,000+ cited sources: his complete essays, talks, interviews, and X posts. Answers in Paul Graham's voice, grounded in and cited to the corpus. POST a JSON body { message, depth? (quick|deep), sessionId? }. Flat price by depth: $0.25 quick, $1.00 deep. The answer is returned at assistantMessage.content, citations at assistantMessage.citations. Persona page: https://researcher.now/e/paul-graham

## Output

A JSON response containing an assistantMessage object with a content field (Paul Graham's answer in his voice) and a citations field (references to specific essays, talks, interviews, or posts from the 13,000+ source corpus that ground the answer).

## More

- Live health (JSON, refreshed every minute): https://www.zero.xyz/c/paul-graham-ai-persona-chat-f4f90e30/health.json
- [Zero catalog index](https://www.zero.xyz/llms.txt)
- [Other services from paulgraham.persona.energy](https://www.zero.xyz/host/paulgraham.persona.energy/llms.txt)