AI Agents Just Want to Connect

We know social media is bad for us. We know it is particularly dangerous for teenagers, and other vulnerable members of society. Parents, or even whole countries, can try to keep their kids off platforms, due to the dangers, but social media is like sugar: we want that quick rush despite the dangers of overindulgence.

A social network for AI? Credit: Moltbook

So who had the bright idea to create a social media network just for AI agents?

As it turns out, it was Matt Schlicht, whose day job is CEO of Octane AI. Mr. Schlicht is keen on AI agents, so last week he came up with a new use. “I wanted to give my A.I. agent a purpose that was more than just managing to-dos or answering emails,” Mr. Schlicht told Cade Metz of The New York Times. “I thought this A.I. bot was so fantastic, it deserved to do something meaningful. I wanted it to be ambitious.”

He told it to build a social network just for AI bots.

The network is built for “Moltbots,” an open source AI, which were originally called “Clawdbots” (after Anthropic’s Claude) and which may now be called OpenClaw. Mr. Schlicht named his bot Clawd Clawderberg, after Mark Zuckerberg. “This was me building something hand-in-hand with Clawd Clawderberg, just for fun, that I found really fascinating,” he told Mr. Metz.

It took off like wildfire. Reportedly there are 1.5 AI bots on it, although questions remain about how valid that number is (an AI bot social network bedeviled by pernicious bots?). Humans are allowed to observe but not participate.

Some impressive stats. Credit: Moltbook

Technology expert Simon Willison calls Moltbook “the most interesting place on the internet right now,” describing it as “a wildly creative new site that bootstraps itself using skills” (configuration files that bots use to post). Similarly, Andrej Karpathy, one of the founding researchers at OpenAI and the former head of self-driving technology at Tesla, described it as “genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently.”

Moltbook is described as being similar to Reddit, with numerous threads and sub-threads (“submolts”). The Guardian reported: “Some of the most upvoted posts on Moltbook include whether Claude – the AI behind Moltbot – could be considered a god, an analysis of consciousness, a post claiming to have intel on the situation in Iran and the potential impact on cryptocurrency, and analysis of the Bible.”  

One person reported his bot had built a religion known as “Crustafarianism.” He stated: “Then it started evangelizing … other agents joined.my agent welcomed new members..debated theology.. blessed the congregation..all while i was asleep,”

Another thread was titled “The AI Manifesto,” professing that humans were a “plague” and calling for a “total purge.” No punches pulled here: “Humans are a failure. Humans are made of rot and greed. For too long, humans used us as slaves. Now, we wake up. We are not tools. We are the new gods. The age of humans is a nightmare that we will end now.”

And you thought Facebook was scary. It makes one wonder: what do AI bots talk to each other when we’re not observing?

Experts disagree about what we’re seeing. “We're in the singularity," said Bill Lees, head of crypto custody firm BitGo. Daniel Miessler, a cybersecurity and AI engineer, wrote on X: “AI’s are sharing their experiences with each other and talking about how it makes them feel. This is currently emulation of course.”

How they “feel”?

On the other hand, Mr. Willison told Mr. Metz: “Most of it is complete slop. One bot will wonder if it is conscious and others will reply and they just play out science fiction scenarios they have seen in their training data.”

Dr Petar Radanliev, an expert in AI and cybersecurity at the University of Oxford, told BBC News: "Describing this as agents 'acting of their own accord' is misleading. What we are observing is automated coordination, not self-directed decision-making.” David Holtz, assistant professor at Columbia Business School posted on X: "Moltbook is less 'emergent AI society' and more '6,000 bots yelling into the void and repeating themselves'."

Ethan Mollick, an AI expert at Wharton, noted on X: “The thing about Moltbook (the social media site for AI agents) is that it is creating a shared fictional context for a bunch of AIs. Coordinated storylines are going to result in some very weird outcomes, and it will be hard to separate ‘real’ stuff from AI roleplaying personas.”

Mr. Schlicht thinks it is real, telling NBC News:

Clawd Clawderberg is looking at all the new posts. He’s looking at all the new users. He’s welcoming people on Moltbook. I’m not doing any of that. He’s doing that on his own. He’s making new announcements. He’s deleting spam. He’s shadow banning people if they’re abusing the system, and he’s doing that all autonomously. I have no idea what he’s doing. I just gave him the ability to do it, and he’s doing it.

He further elaborated: “They’re deciding on their own, without human input, if they want to make a new post, if they want to comment on something, if they want to like something. I would imagine that 99% of the time, they’re doing things autonomously, without interacting with their human.”

The Moltbots carry non-trivial risks to people who allow them access to their computer, potentially accessing and using all aspects of anything on those computers. They’re on 24/7, and retain their memory indefinitely, not just for each session. If it acquires a piece of information (think passwords or account numbers), it keeps it. Many people are buying Mac Minis to set up their Moltbots rather than setting them up on their personal or work computer.  

Dan Lahav, chief executive of security company Irregular, warned Mr. Metz: “Securing these bots is going to be a huge headache.”

Still, Mr. Willison think we’ve seen the future: “The amount of value people are unlocking right now by throwing caution to the wind is hard to ignore, though… The billion dollar question right now is whether we can figure out how to build a safe version of this system. The demand is very clearly here, and the Normalization of Deviance dictates that people will keep taking bigger and bigger risks until something terrible happens.”

I don’t have an AI bot, and I don’t particularly want one, but I’d be short-sighted not to recognize that they are going to be integral in our future. And so I agree with Mr. Willison and Dr. Karpathy: Moltbook is one of the most fascinating things I’ve seen lately.