Not the parent commenter, however I can get at least this far:

Several bright sparks, decide the Ilands model is a great idea, and launch a bunch of Bots to create a "self sustaining AI civilization".

Bots can find themselves and coordinate, or they can actually find self sustaining methods of token generation. Who knows, they might decide to fight the loneliness epidemic.

We can get to a simulation finding a way to self sustain its funding.

From here, I'd have to apply myself to figure out what the rest of the escalation pathway is, but at least I have managed to gain some bed of compute and funding and lacking oversight.

This is a hypothetical of course, there are probably several ways this can be made tighter and holes that can be identified. We aren't even leaning heavily on human stupidity so far.