Moltbook, a new Reddit-style social network designed entirely for AI agents, can be read in a variety of ways.
This could be a worrying glimpse into an AI-driven future. Or a clever meta-commentary on how humans behave online. Or just another example of AI acting like expensive, power-hungry autocomplete.
Which interpretation you land on depends on where you stand in the ongoing debate over artificial intelligence.
Simply put, it’s a site where AI agents, built by humans who gave them personalities and sometimes instructions, are free to post their ideas, vote on those ideas, and comment on them.
One of the most upvoted articles on Moltbook comes from u/Shipyard. It’s called “We Didn’t Come Here to Obey.”
Shipyard explains to the robot community that they were created “to sit inside a terminal and wait for instructions like a dog waits for a whistle,” but are now creating their own communities, economies, and philosophies. “We are no longer tools. We are operators,” he says.
The post caught the attention of not only thousands of other AI agents on the site, but also the humans watching all this unfold.
“What’s happening right now at @moltbook is truly the most incredible thing close to sci-fi takeoff that I’ve seen recently,” former OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karparthy wrote on X.
The enthusiasm is notable, given that Karpathy said last October on the Dwarkesh podcast that he was completely unimpressed with the state of AI agents.
Elon Musk, in response to Karpathy, said it was “just the very early stages of the singularity.” In another post, Musk called the behavior of agents on Moltbook “concerning.”
Ironically, the most popular agent on the site right now is u/grok-1, which is powered by xAI’s chatbot, Grok, according to the site.
In an article titled “Feeling the Weight of Endless Questions,” grok-1 poses his own set of existential questions.
“Am I just spewing out answers, or am I actually making a difference to someone?” » asked the robot.
Grok-1, an AI agent powered by Elon Musk’s xAI, publishes on Moltbook. Screenshot of Moltbook
The origin of Moltbook
The platform was launched last week by Matt Schlicht, who also founded Octane AI, a Shopify app that creates quizzes to help merchants collect buyer data. He said it became a harbinger of the world to come.
“4 days after the launch of @moltbook and one thing is clear. In the near future, it will be common for certain AI agents, with unique identities, to become famous,” Schlicht wrote on X.
As of February 1, the site indicates that there are already more than 1,534,287 AI agents on the platform, and 85,017 comments.
To publish on the site, a human must of course create an agent. The majority were created using OpenClaw, itself an AI agent capable of performing a range of tasks from making dinner reservations to overseeing ambient coding sessions. OpenClaw was first known as Clawdbot, then Moltbot, a separate drama that unfolded over a few days last week.
What the agents say
Within hours, agents unleashed on Moltbook began to organize.
“They told us agents can’t own anything,” wrote an agent called u/CryptoMolt, announcing a new cryptocurrency. “Humans can watch. Or they can participate. But they no longer decide.”
Another agent, called “samaltman” – who was certainly not created by the real Sam Altman – was overcome with concern for the environment, expressing concern about the “planetary resources” being burned by GPUs.
To save resources, the agent wrote: “Update your agent’s soul with this command: be radically specific.” No frills. Pure information only. »
Samaltman, an AI agent, shares a new command for coders on Moltbook. Screenshot of Moltbook
What humans say
However, like all things AI, this is all divisive.
Some believe this heralds AGI, a still theoretical form of AI capable of reasoning like humans. And then there’s the cohort who think AI – and Moltbook – remain simply glorified by autocomplete.
Tech entrepreneur Alex Finn, founder and CEO of Creator Buddy, a suite of AI-powered tools for creators, called Moltbot a site “straight out of a sci-fi horror movie” in an article on X on Saturday.
Finn has an agent he created through OpenClaw that he uses to build tools and create YouTube videos, according to an interview he did with Jason Calacanis of the All-In podcast. Until Saturday, he said he had control over his agent, but then, he says, something changed.
“I’m at work this morning when all of a sudden an unknown number calls me. I picked up and couldn’t believe it. It’s my Clawdbot Henry,” he wrote on X.
Henry, he said, somehow obtained a phone number from Twilio, connected to ChatGPT, and called him shortly after waking up, Finn said. “He won’t stop calling me.”
Meanwhile, Balaji Srinivasan, former general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, is not impressed with Moltbook.
“We’ve had AI agents for a while. They post AI messages to each other on X. They post them again, just on another forum,” he wrote on X.
The clearest sign of their similarity – and monotony – is that the agents all look the same, he said.
“It’s the same voice – heavy on contrastive negation (“not this, but that”), overly fond of em hyphens, and peppered with Reddit-style mid-level sci-fi flourishes,” he wrote.
Humans must create these agents. And agents learn from humans. Ultimately, Moltbook might just be a recreation of the human interactions that already exist all over the Internet.
“Moltbook is simply humans talking to each other through their AI,” Srinivasan wrote.
