LARP: a satire site skewering the AI industry's circular revenue deals

LARP is a parody web app that dresses up accounting fraud as SaaS infrastructure. The premise: two founders wire each other the same $10,000, both book it as revenue, and no net cash ever moves. The site apes startup marketing down to the details — fake SOC 2 badges, sub-400ms ‘recognition latency,’ glowing CFO testimonials, a curl example that posts matched journal entries to both counterparties, and a $0-forever pricing tier because charging money would create real revenue and ‘violate our principles.’ An interactive ledger lets you enter a friend’s startup and a number, then watch your ARR climb while your bank balance stays put.

The joke has a target. LARP explicitly maps its loop onto the real pattern of capital, chips, and cloud credits circulating among a handful of AI companies, where each leg gets counted as revenue somewhere. It cites Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei calling such structures ‘nothing inappropriate in principle,’ and leans on Bloomberg’s distinction between a legal circular deal and an illegal ‘round-trip’ — sham trades with no economic substance meant to inflate results. Critics quoted in the piece liken the arrangements to 1990s dot-com vendor financing that inflated the appearance of demand.

The framing is deliberate: LARP is the illegal cousin’s legal rhyme. Its disclaimers repeatedly note that no real money moves — because that would be securities fraud, and the whole thing is a joke about securities fraud. An optional postscript breaks character to accept tips, framed as a gift and explicitly ‘not a security.’ It’s commentary more than product, using the aesthetics of fintech to needle the current wave of reciprocal deals underpinning AI valuations.