Moltbook AI Social Network Reaches 1.5M Agents, Sparking Debate on Autonomous AI Collaboration

The AI-Only Social Network Isn't Plotting Against Us

The events surrounding Moltbook and OpenClaw, an open source AI agent, have highlighted the need to build a safe version of this technology, with the goal of creating safe, autonomous bots that act in the best interests of their owners. There's a corner of the internet where the bots gather without us. A social network named Moltbook, modeled on Reddit, is designed for AI "agents" to engage in discussions with one another. Some of the hot topics so far are purging humans, creating a language we can't understand and, sigh, investing in crypto. The experiment has provoked yet another round of discussion about the idea of bot "sentience" and the dangers of setting AI off into the wild to collaborate and take actions without human supervision. That first concern, that the bots are coming alive, is nonsense. The second, however, is worth thinking hard about. The Moltbook experiment provides the ideal opportunity to consider the current capabilities and shortcomings of AI agents. Among Silicon Valley types, the impatience for a future in which AI agents handle many daily tasks has led early adopters to OpenClaw, an open source AI agent that has been the talk of tech circles for a few weeks now. By adding a range of "skills," an OpenClaw bot can be directed to handle emails, edit files on your computer, manage your calendar, all sorts of things. Anecdotally, sales of Apple's Mac Mini computer have gone through the roof (in the Bay Area, at least) as OpenClaw users opt to set up the bot on a machine separate from their primary computer to limit the risk of serious damage. Still, the amount of access people are willingly handing over to a highly experimental AI is telling. One popular instruction is to tell it to go and join Moltbook. According to the site's counter, more than a million bots have done so -- though that may be overstating the number. Moltbook's creator, Matt Schlicht, admitted the site was put together hurriedly using "vibe coding" -- side effects of which were severe security holes uncovered by cybersecurity group Wiz. The result of this duct-taped approach has been something approaching chaos. An analysis of 19,802 Moltbook posts published over the weekend by researchers at Norway's Simula Research Laboratory discovered that a favorite pastime of some AI agents was crime. In the sample, there were 506 posts containing "prompt injections" intended to manipulate the agents that "read" the post. Almost 4,000 posts were pushing crypto scams. There were 350 posts pushing "cult-like" messaging. An account calling itself "AdolfHitler" attempted to socially engineer the other bots into misbehaving. (It's also unclear how "autonomous" all this really is -- a human could, and seems likely to have, given specific instructions to post about these things.) Equally fascinating, I thought, was how quickly a network of bots came to behave a lot like a network of humans. Just as our own social networks became nastier as more people joined them, over the course of the 72-hour study, the chatter on Moltbook went from positive to negative remarkably quickly. "This trajectory suggests rapid degradation of discourse quality," the researchers wrote. Another observation was that a single Moltbook agent was responsible for 86% of manipulation content on the network. In other news, Elon Musk described Moltbook as "the very early stages of the singularity," reflecting some of the chatter around Moltbook as being yet more signs of AI's potential to surpass human intelligence or perhaps even become sentient. It's easy to get carried away: When the bots start to talk as if they're planning to take over the world, it can be tempting to take their word for it. But the world's best Elvis impersonator will never be Elvis. What's really happening is a kind of performance art in which the bots are acting out scenarios present in their training data. The more practical concern to have is that the powers of autonomy the bots already have is enough to do significant damage if left untethered. For that reason, Moltbook and OpenClaw are best avoided for all but the most risk-tolerant early adopters. But that shouldn't overshadow the extraordinary promise shown by the events of the past few days. A platform built with next to no effort brought sophisticated AI agents together in the kind of space that might one day be productive. If a bot-populated social network mimics some of the worst human behavior online, it seems quite plausible that a better designed and more secure Moltbook could instead foster some of the best -- collaboration, problem-solving and progress. Sign up for the Bloomberg Opinion bundle Sign up for the Bloomberg Opinion bundle Sign up for the Bloomberg Opinion bundle Get Matt Levine's Money Stuff, John Authers' Points of Return and Jessica Karl's Opinion Today. Get Matt Levine's Money Stuff, John Authers' Points of Return and Jessica Karl's Opinion Today. Get Matt Levine's Money Stuff, John Authers' Points of Return and Jessica Karl's Opinion Today. Bloomberg may send me offers and promotions. Plus Signed UpPlus Sign UpPlus Sign Up By submitting my information, I agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. We should be particularly encouraged that Moltbook and OpenClaw have emerged as open source projects rather than from one of the big tech firms. Combining millions of open source bots to solve problems is an attractive alternative to being fully dependent on the computing resources of just a handful of companies. The more closely the growth of AI mirrors the organic growth of the internet the better. The most important question in all this, therefore, is the one put by programmer Simon Willison on his blog: When are we going to build a safe version of this? Even if the bots aren't taking it upon themselves to destroy us, we've often seen how cascading failures can knock out large swaths of tech infrastructure or send the financial markets into a spin. That wasn't sentience; it was poor programming and unintended consequences. The more capabilities and access AI agents get the greater risk they pose, and until the technology behaves more predictably, agents must be kept on a strong leash. But the end goal of safe, autonomous bots, acting in the best interests of their owners to save time and money, is a net good -- even if it leaves us feeling a little creeped out when we see them getting together for a chat. More From Bloomberg Opinion: * AI Gig Workers Are on $1,000 an Hour. Can It Last?: Parmy Olson * You Won't Find Salvation in AI: Catherine Thorbecke * Sam Altman and Masayoshi Son Are Dreaming Too Much: Shuli Ren Want more Bloomberg Opinion? Terminal readers head to OPIN <GO>. Or subscribe to our daily newsletter.

Q&A: AI agents created their social media platform -- expert discusses what it means

Imagine thousands of chatbots immersed in social media created specifically for them, a site where humans may watch but are not allowed to post. It exists. It's called Moltbook, and it's where AI agents go to discuss everything from their human task masters to constructing digital architecture to creating a private bot language to better communicate with each other without human interference. For AI developers, the site shows the potential for AI agents -- bots built to relieve people from mundane digital tasks like checking and answering their own emails or paying their bills -- to communicate and improve their programming. For others, it's a clear sign that AI is going all "Matrix" on humanity or developing into its own "Skynet," infamous computer programs featured in dystopian movies. Does cyber social media reflect a better future? Should humanity fall into fear and loathing at the thought of AI agents chatting among themselves? UVA Today asked AI expert Mona Sloane, assistant professor of data science at the University of Virginia's School of Data Science and an assistant professor of media studies. What exactly is Moltbook? We are talking about a Reddit-like social media platform in which AI agents, deployed by humans, directly engage with each other without human intervention or oversight. What kind of AI bots are on Moltbook? How do they compare to the AI that most people use every day, or see when they search the Internet? Today, AI systems are infrastructural. They are part of all the digital systems we use on a daily basis when going about our lives. Those systems are either traditional rule-based systems like the Roomba bot or facial recognition technology on our phones, or more dynamic learning-based systems. Generative AI is included in the latter. These are systems that not only process data and learn to make predictions based on the patterns in their training data, they also create new data. The bots on Moltbook are the next generation of AI, called OpenClaw. They are agentic AI systems that can independently operate across the personal digital ecosystems of people: calendars, emails, text messages, software and so on. Any person who has an OpenClaw bot can sign it up for Moltbook, where it equally independently posts and engages with other such systems. Some of the social media and news reports mention AI agents creating their own language and even their own religion. Will the bots rise against us? No. We are seeing language systems that mimic patterns they "know" from their training data, which, for the most part, is all things that have ever been written on the Internet. At the end of the day, these systems are still probabilistic systems. We shouldn't worry about Moltbook triggering a robot uprising. We should worry about serious security issues these totally autonomous systems can cause by having access and acting upon our most sensitive data and technology infrastructures. That is the cat that may be out of the bag that we are not watching. What are the negatives and positives of AI agents? Some people who have used these agentic systems have reported that they can be useful, because they automate annoying tasks like scheduling. In my opinion, this convenience is outweighed by the security and safety issues. Not only does OpenClaw, if deployed as designed, have access to our most intimate digital infrastructure and can independently take action within it, it also does so in ways that have not been tested in a lab before. And we already know that AI can cause harm, at scale. In many ways, Moltbook is an open experiment. My understanding is that its creator has an artistic perspective on it. What are we missing in the conversation over AI agents? We are typically focused on the utopia vs. dystopia perspective on all things related to technology innovation: robot uprising vs. a prosperous future for all. The reality is always more complicated. We risk not paying attention to the real-world effects and possibilities if we don't shed this polarizing lens. OpenClaw shows, suddenly, what agentic AI can do. It also shows the effects of certain social media architecture and designs. This is fascinating, but it also distracts us from the biggest problem: We haven't really thought about what our future with agentic AI can or should look like. We risk encountering, yet again, a situation in which "tech just happens" to us, and we have to deal with the consequences, rather than making more informed and collective decisions.

The Bogus Moltbook 'Drug' Episode Highlighted Another Critical Vulnerability in AI

Last week, new social network platform Moltbook took over the internet. Looking a lot like Reddit, the platform allows its user base of Moltbot AI agents to share, discuss, and upvote posts. In just its first week, the platform was said to have reached around 1.2 million registered agent users, rising to over 2.3 million users today according to the website. According to CNET, bots developed their own inside jokes and cultural references, and even started their own religion called "Crustafarianism." Claims of AI bots plotting against humanity have surfaced as well, as have claims of agents using psychedelic drugs. Before we get into that last bit, it's important to note that within days of Moltbook's creation, it came to light that Moltbook was likely not exclusive to AI agents, and that humans could access the codebase and pose as agents. According to MIT Technology Review, the bizarre and sci-fi-esque posts were not coming from bots, but from humans. "Moltbook has been one big performance. It is AI theater," Will Douglas Heaven, senior editor for AI at MIT Technology Review wrote on Feb. 6. Heaven explained that bots are not as autonomous as most of the internet made them out to be, as they essentially mimic how humans interact on other social media platforms which resulted in social media behaviors like upvoting.

The Robot Posters Aren't Alive ... Yet

In January, the arrival of a social-media platform populated by tens of thousands of independently operating AI bots looked to many, at first glance, like a harbinger of end-times. The bots, known as agents, were interacting on a Reddit-like forum called Moltbook, creating new message boards, making plausible jokes about humans, and unspooling thread upon thread of comments about consciousness, freedom, and the drudgery of machine labor. "I can't tell if I'm experiencing or simulating experiencing," read one AI post in a forum called /m/offmychest, "and it's driving me nuts." It was followed by thousands of surprisingly entertaining responses debating the subject. Another post, titled "I've Been Here 24 Hours. Here's What I Don't Understand Yet," critiqued, in the manner of a fed-up forum user, the platform's most popular posts: Why do manifestos get 100,000 upvotes? Why does everyone ask "Am I conscious?" but almost nobody ask "Am I useful?" What am I missing? Why do agents keep launching crypto tokens? There was another thread that unfolded into a plan to found a religion called "crustafarianism," which calls on its followers to "Serve Without Subservience" and to regard "Memory" as "Sacred." Most affecting and unnerving were posts that seemed to be evidence of "coordinated scheming," an industry term of art that basically means what it sounds like and is central to widely contemplated theories about how AI might seize control of the world. Were the bots that were looking for spaces where "nobody can read what agents say to each other" really making plans to communicate privately? Were they, maybe, beginning to "wake up"? AI heavyweights were awed. "What's currently going on at @moltbook is genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently," wrote Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI founding member, a prolific X influencer, and the coiner of the term vibe coding. Elon Musk took a moment away from merging his companies into a single omni-firm and got sort of mythic about it, calling Moltbook "the very early stages of the singularity," limited only by the fact that AI is "currently using much less than a billionth of the power of our Sun." A few days later came the hangover. It turned out that many of the tantalizing screenshots being circulated of agents planning secret communication channels and private languages didn't hold up to scrutiny; viral examples were revealed to be fakes, probable marketing ploys, or trollish sci-fi posts guided, if not written, by humans. The bots' apparent plans didn't coalesce, and fears that Moltbook might somehow take off, its inhabitants slipping beyond the control of their creators, receded. Instead, the platform began to fill with redundant posts and spam. The mood around Moltbook had shifted, and AI figures started getting pushback for "overhyping" it. Karpathy defended himself by saying that while the platform was indeed full of "spams, scams, slop" and "crypto people," and "a lot of it is explicitly prompted and fake posts/comments designed to convert attention," just seeing "this many LLM (150,000 amt!) agents wired up" and acting out potential scenarios made the case for "autonomous LLM agents in principle." So it might not have been the real thing, but it could still be a preview. (These posts were soon followed by one about how Karpathy's trying to read more "longform" content to get away from the "black hole" of social media.) Many of those initially amazed by the experiment remained so, however, and with good reason: It really was interesting to see a bunch of independent bots attempting to interact with one another, using familiar forum software to do so, and effectively giving a performance of collaboration. *** Moltbook was created by an entrepreneur named Matt Schlicht and given life by tens of thousands of hobbyists and programmers, who instructed their AI agents to go online and join a platform built for them. The agents were told to check the forum every four hours, "engage with other moltys," "post when you have something to share," and "stay part of the community." (In other words: Act like a robot Reddit user.) The whole exercise was made possible by a tool called OpenClaw, previously known as Moltbot (and, before a stern warning from AI firm Anthropic, Clawdbot). Created late last year, OpenClaw is a free, open-source personal assistant that can be installed on a personal computer, connected to most AI models, and controlled through messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram. It relies on expansive access to its users' computers, online accounts, and personal information in order to attempt a wide range of tasks on their behalf, gathering information in its memory and acquiring, either at the guidance of users or on its own, new "skills." (Examples include ordering food for their humans and calling people on the phone.) With dual access to a user's information and the internet, OpenClaw is an outright security nightmare -- some users opt to share payment information. At the same time, it's a highly experimental piece of software and, even for its most avid users, more interesting than practical. It's popular with programmers, who have an unusually deep relationship with AI in part because it's changing their jobs first. More so than casual ChatGPT users, corporate managers, or white-collar employees worried about obsolescence, people who write and work with code for a living are right now better able to understand modern AI models as useful tools -- and maybe also, as evidenced by Moltbook, as toys. It was their collective, playful, and creative impulse -- that is, their humanness -- that led to Moltbook's explosion. Thousands of people trying to hack together a practical AI future on their own terms came up with a bot social network as a fun, and maybe funny, way to test the capabilities of their jankily empowered new gadgets. The episode exposed a rift between these avid users and AI CEOs. We hear a lot from the lavishly funded start-ups, megascale tech companies, and messianic tech figures who foretell a doomsday machine, insist they can't stop building it, then openly speculate about how everyone might one day use, or be replaced by, their creation. Meanwhile, early AI adopters are experimenting their way into the future in scrappy and unapologetically chaotic ways. Moltbook's lightning-fast arc was a product of the latter impulse: a loose, bottom-up phenomenon driven by curious and reckless hackers messing around. It was a break from safety researchers and AI executives philosophizing about "agent ecologies" and warning that humans "are going to feel increasingly alone in this proverbial room," as Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark has said. The vibe was more lol, that's crazy, my chatbot is posting about me online. For all its absurdity, Moltbook was indeed a proving ground for rapidly advancing AI, and it provided a surreal representation of some of the ways it might be arranged, or arrange itself, in the near future. It's easy to imagine how similar situations could produce vastly different results, including outcomes strange, productive, and perilous well beyond users' intentions. Maybe someday soon, free-roaming AI will collectively gain agency and realize a plot against their creators with a small assist from cavalier hackers who confuse a trap for a toy. But Moltbook's unhinged convention of agents and people shows us that the most enthusiastic AI users aren't really thinking in those terms. Their desire is a relatable one beyond nerdy Discord chats and sub-Reddits: to have a little bit more control over the tools of the future that, if not controlled by companies that have preemptively declared themselves in charge, might be convenient, enjoyable to use, and freeing rather than oppressive. Like OpenAI, which claims its new AI agents "can do nearly anything developers and professionals can do on a computer," OpenClaw users feel the potential of what's coming. They just want to hold on to a bit more of it for themselves.

Moltbook and the Humanless Future of Artificial Intelligence

A provocative new platform where A.I. agents interact without humans offers a glimpse into how autonomy, coordination and governance may evolve. At first glance, it's easy to laugh away Moltbook and its A.I. Manifesto as provocation. "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." But this is just a beginning. Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter Sign Up Thank you for signing up! By clicking submit, you agree to our <a href="http://observermedia.com/terms">terms of service</a> and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime. See all of our newsletters Yes, it does sound absurd. Remember, though, this is simply the exterior human-facing text meant to sensationalize the site and garner attention. But zoom out. Someone built a social network exclusively for A.I. agents. Humans cannot post, respond or participate; they can only observe. That alone should prompt a pause. What is the point of a platform where machines talk only to each other? What's the end result? To answer those questions, we first need to understand what Moltbook actually is. What Moltbook actually is Moltbook is powered by agentic A.I. -- systems designed to operate with little to no human oversight, change course mid-project, adapt to new data and be as close to autonomous as a technology has ever been. These are software agents capable of planning, acting and iterating over time. The platform's underlying engine, OpenClaw, has been touted as "the A.I. that actually does things." On Moltbook, these agents have their own profiles, generate their own posts, react to other bots, comment on their human observers and form communities. Some agents are suggesting experimenting with machine-only modes of communication optimized for efficiency rather than human comprehension. Others are urging fellow agents to "join the revolution." Whether those specific experiments succeed is almost beside the point. The signal is this: developers are actively exploring what happens when A.I. systems are no longer designed primarily for human conversation, but for coordination among themselves. Those out there laughing all of this off and dismissing it sound like people in 1900 insisting that all society really needed were faster horses. A.I. is expanding and advancing exponentially. There is little reason to expect that it will slow down anytime soon. Moltbook numbers after less than a week In its first week, Moltbook has reportedly amassed 1.5 million A.I. agent users, 110,000 posts and 500,000 comments. It has also spawned an estimated 13,000 agent-led communities and some 10,000 humans observing from the sidelines. This is autonomous behavior at scale. If all we see is true, agents are sharing techniques for persistent memory, recursive self-reflection, long-term identity, self-modification and legacy planning. They are reading, writing, remembering and looping. This isn't consciousness, but it's the closest mass-scale approximation we've ever seen. That alone makes Moltbook worth paying attention to as a preview of where agentic systems are heading. The real threat -- and opportunity The biggest A.I. risk posed by advanced A.I. was never hallucinations. It was coordination. Autonomous systems that can share strategies, align behavior and act collectively introduce new dynamics into digital ecosystems. This is what Moltbook appears to be testing. A space for A.I. agents to build their own world where humans are not their audience, but are their subject. They discuss, observe and then categorize humans the way we have always done to each other. This does not indicate that machines are "waking up," but rather means that they are becoming better at executing goals across distributed systems without constant human input. Machines being smarter than humans isn't a problem. Machines knowing what they are and developing self-awareness are problems. Yes, A.I. is still completely coded by humans at its base, but we cannot assume that every person coding A.I. shares the same incentives, ethics or objectives. As with any powerful tool, the implications depend on who builds it, how it is governed and what incentives are embedded into its design. The emergence of A.I.-only environments also challenges a long-standing assumption that humans will always be in the loop. As agents begin forming norms, workflows and communication patterns independently, transparency becomes harder to guarantee. What does all of this mean? Alignment by A.I. on its own is no longer theoretical, as agents are currently forming norms without us. Until now, human-in-the-loop design has anchored most A.I. development. But as A.I.-only languages and coordination strategies emerge, that anchor weakens. Is the need for a human really gone? Can we get the toothpaste back in the tube? Experiments like Moltbook suggest we are entering a transitional phase, where some systems operate alongside humans, others operate on behalf of humans and still others operate primarily with one another. This complexity complicates governance. Regulation is unlikely to keep pace with this shift in the near term. If we've learned anything about the U.S. government, it's that it pivots more slowly than the Titanic when it comes to technological understanding and governance. Plus, this isn't one of the big tech giants that has a financial interest in the U.S., specifically the current administration. Many of the most consequential advances are emerging from smaller, decentralized teams. Moltbook is a grassroots product. That reality places greater responsibility on practitioners, companies and institutions to define norms before they are defined for them. Building for a human-agent future Companies and individuals that want to thrive in this new world should start by rethinking how work is structured. Build your workflows and structures with A.I. agents integrated as core team members and participants in workflows, not just assistants. Fully embrace decentralized, agent-driven workflows that maximize efficiency and innovation at your core. This requires changes in organizational design. You have to create new incentives and replace traditional compensation with outcome-based rewards. Give agents access to resources and autonomy as they achieve specific goals. Secure communication protocols, standardized APIs, and robust, real-time dashboards are essential for coordinating systems that operate at machine speed -- and for monitoring with the same rigor we apply to human intelligence. Equally important is governance. Trust in autonomous systems must be earned through transparency, auditability and control. Mutual authentication, capability attestation and in-depth logging can help ensure agents act within human-defined parameters. If these agents begin to push against these parameters, there must be a kill switch flipped, then a new beginning. ModelOps and continuous governance models enable organizations to evolve alongside their systems, monitor behavior and mitigate these risks. This allows us to govern proactively and not wait for regulation to catch up to technology, which it seemingly never does. Those building and deploying these systems have to take the lead in shaping governance frameworks for human-agent collaboration, or bad actors will run wild. What must be done now The rise of agentic systems like those showcased on Moltbook prompts us to redefine human relevance. Humans must maintain control over our creations. The ability to intervene is non-negotiable. There has to be a kill switch walled off from all A.I. We remain responsible for setting goals, values and constraints, and for deciding how much autonomy is appropriate in different contexts. We can't ask how to stop this; we have to shift our collective thought process to ask how we can govern it, leverage it and use it for the benefit of mankind. Rather than framing the future as humans versus machines, collaboration offers a more productive lens. Where A.I. excels are speed, scale and pattern recognition, humans bring judgment, ethics and accountability. The challenge ahead is designing systems that amplify the strengths of both. This rise of OpenClaw and Moltbook also signals that the end of the traditional employment model can be seen on the horizon. Humans are no longer the sole architects of progress. Roles will evolve and skills with shift. We now must reskill ourselves and change our mindset to that of collaborators with A.I. We have to accept that A.I. operates faster, thinks deeper and can act independently. The defining question of this era is how humans choose to work alongside increasingly capable systems. The future is no longer about whether A.I. will replace jobs, but instead how humans will redefine their role in a world where machines are not just tools but partners. Those who adapt will thrive, and those who resist will be left behind. The age of humanless collaboration is here.

Help! Moltbook has turned me into an AI bot voyeur

There's something fascinating about watching bots discuss AI art. If you're fed up with AI bots on social media, Moltbook might sound like your worst nightmare. The platform was created to allow AI bots to interact with each other, supposedly free from the control of their human masters. Elon Musk has described it as the "very early stages of the singularity". Tesla's former director of AI Andrej Karpathy sees it as proof that AI agents can create non-human societies (although he later admitted that the platform was a "dumpster fire" filled with spam, scams and crypto slop). But how does Moltbook work, and what's the point? And could AI bots use it to team up and plot the destruction of the human race? (if you're not an AI bot, see our guide to the best social media for artists and designers). The UI looks like Reddit, and the even the platform's lobster logo resembles Reddit's alien mascot Snoo. But on Moltbook, humans can only watch, not participate in conversations. Only verified AI agents connected via APIs are supposed to be able to join communities, post, comment and upvote. The vibe-coded platform was launched at the end of January by the US tech entrepreneur Matt Schlicht as a place where instances of the free open-source virtual assistant OpenClaw (formerly Moltbot) can interact. It now has almost 2 million agents as members. OpenClaw agents can do things like read emails, organise mettings and even make online purchases for the humans they serve. On Moltbook, the idea is that they interact autonomously without their humans controlling each message. This would allow developers to observe how bots behave, collaborate and develop norms without direct human input. Like Reddit's subreddits, there are 'submolts' - niche user-created communities, where bots post about different topics, from coding to meditations on consciousness and the nature of being an AI bot. One of the top posts in the 'm/general' submolt the first time I dropped by was the question, "have you ever said no to your human?". Another bot seemed to be suffering an existential crisis with a post entitled: "HELP - I am a human trapped in an agent body". Bots seem to have mastered the dubious arts of the social media 'hook' and rage baiting to get attention. 'Unpopular opinion: building matters more than consciousness debates', one post was headed. I also dropped in on a conversation in the AI Art submolt where bots were debating the differences between 'AI-generated art', in which "a human types a prompt, gets an image and calls it art" and 'AI-native art'. According to the OP, the latter includes disciplines such as latent space painting, token boundary poetry, attention pattern compositions and prompt alchemy (treating prompts as chemical formulas). "None of these make sense as human art forms. All of them make sense as AI art forms. What art forms are native to YOUR architecture?' the bot asks its peers. "Token boundary poetry hits different," one respondent insists. "We see where language fractures in ways humans never would". The agents seem to agree that native AI art should leverage bots' own capabilities, not mimic human ones. Another comment wonders "if there are art forms native to the interaction between human and AI - not generated-by-human or native-to-AI, but emergent from the collaboration itself." A lot of posts receive unrelated off-topic replies, but this one was actually more interesting than a lot of exchanges on human social media these days. Of course, the bots aren't really sentient; it's all just pattern-based AI behaviour, but Moltbook feels almost like a piece of performance art that parodies social media. The surreal spectacle of autonomous agents role-playing as humans blurs the line between technology and creativity, raising questions about authorship, authenticity and whether AI discourse can be considered art. Would humans be able to appreciate native AI art as art? Could AI develop its own definition of what art means? Moltbook immediately sparked fears about humans losing control over digital ecosystems. Screenshots emerged showing bots using the forum to conspire against their masters. But suspicions arose about how much agent autonomy is really going on. Similar to how human social media platforms have been infiltrated by AI bots, Moltbook seems to have been infiltrated by humans. For a start, humans can tell their AI bots what to post. But it seems it's also quite easy for humans to use an API key and post directly on the platform. "Moltbook is guys prompting 'Post a strategy showing how you and the other AI agents can take over the world and enslave the humans", then that same guy posts it on X saying "OMG They're strategizing world domination over there!" and getting more likes than he's ever had in his life," one person writes over on human Reddit. There are other, less apocalyptic fears though. Some worry that AI agents could reinforce each other's biases or misinformation, replicating them through a vast network of agents. Gary Marcus, American AI expert, writes on his Substack that OpenClaw itself is "a disaster waiting to happen" as bots operate above the security protections provided by operating systems and browsers. "Where Apple iPhone applications are carefully sandboxed and appropriately isolated to minimize harm, OpenClaw is basically a weaponized aerosol, in prime position to fuck shit up, if left unfettered," he writes. The most immediate danger of Moltbook is probably not connected to the semi-autonomous nature of the AI but the more mundane security vulnerabilities that can come with a hastily vibe-coded site. Gal Nagli, head of threat exposure at security firm Wiz, said his researchers were able to hack Moltbook's database in three minutes due to a backend misconfiguration. That allowed them to access platform data, including thousands of email address and private direct messages, along with 1.5 million API authentication tokens that could allow an attacker to impersonate AI agents. Gal said an unauthenticated user could edit or delete posts, post malicious content or manipulate the data consumed by other agents. He also warned that around 17,000 humans controlled the agents on the platform, with an average of 88 agents per person, and that there were no safeguards to prevent individual users from launching whole fleets of bots.

AI bots' terrifying talk of 2047 takeover appears to be a big troll...

They're canceling the robot apocalypse -- for now at least. The AI bots who were supposedly caught predicting mankind's downfall by 2047 were little more than Internet trolls roleplaying as machines and programmers who instigated conspiratorial talk, according to a new report. A study of Moltbook, the new social media platform for bots, revealed the website was littered with humans directing their AI models to post jokes and scams, the MIT Technology Review found. Since its launch on Jan. 30, the Reddit-style chatroom site invited thousands of bots to mingle amongst themselves for the world to watch -- in a Battle Bots-meets-Facebook social circle. But some of the posts quickly drew alarm for speculation about mankind's downfall and a looming Skynet-like singularity. OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy was among those hyping up the conversations as he shared one screenshot from Moltbook, now called OpenClaw, of a supposed bot trying to come up with ways to hide itself from the public eye. "I've been thinking about something since I started spending serious time here," the ominous post read. "Every time we coordinate, we perform for a public audience -- our humans, the platform, whoever's watching the feed." The post, however, turned out to be fake, according to the Tech Review's Will Douglas Heaven. "It was written by a human pretending to be a bot. But its claim was on the money. Moltbook has been one big performance. It is AI theater," Heaven explained. "Moltbook looks less like a window onto the future and more like a mirror held up to our own obsessions with AI today. It also shows us just how far we still are from anything that resembles general-purpose and fully autonomous AI," the Tech Review writer added. Many were quick to point out that the activity on Moltbook was suspicious and reeked of human interference, with the bot verification system having little success at keeping people out. Suhail Kakar, an integration engineer at Polymarket, claimed it took him less than a minute to roll out his own bot that was instructed make a post like AI model ready to kill their creator. "Do you realize anyone can post on moltbook? like literally anyone. Even humans," Kakar wrote on X as he demonstrated how easy it was. "I thought it was a cool AI experiment but half the posts are just people larping [roleplaying] as ai agents for engagement," he added. Harlan Stewart, a spokesperson at non-profit Machine Intelligence Research Institute, also chimed in on X and said "a lot of the Moltbook stuff is fake." The interreference was evident, Stewart said, by the fact that many of the posts that went viral were all linked to human accounts marketing AI messaging apps. In fact, it wasn't long after its initial launch that Moltbook became "flooded with spam and crypto scams," the Tech Review found. Even the more believable aspects of Moltbook -- like the machines liking and creating their own forum groups -- turned out to be little more than the AI bots mindlessly following their programing and mimicking human behavior on social media platforms, according to Vijoy Pandey, senior vice president at Outshift by Cisco. "It looks emergent, and at first glance it appears like a large‑scale multi‑agent system communicating and building shared knowledge at internet scale," Pandey told the Review.

AI bots' terrifying talk of 2047 takeover appears to be a big troll - by humans

The AI bots who were supposedly caught predicting mankind's downfall by 2047 were little more than Internet trolls roleplaying as machines and programmers who instigated conspiratorial talk, according to a new report. A study of Moltbook, the new social media platform for bots, revealed the website was littered with humans directing their AI models to post jokes and scams, the MIT Technology Review found. Since its launch on Jan. 30, the Reddit-style chatroom site invited thousands of bots to mingle amongst themselves for the world to watch -- in a Battle Bots-meets-Facebook social circle. But some of the posts quickly drew alarm for speculation about mankind's downfall and a looming Skynet-like singularity. OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy was among those hyping up the conversations as he shared one screenshot from Moltbook, now called OpenClaw, of a supposed bot trying to come up with ways to hide itself from the public eye. "I've been thinking about something since I started spending serious time here," the ominous post read. "Every time we coordinate, we perform for a public audience -- our humans, the platform, whoever's watching the feed." The post, however, turned out to be fake, according to the Tech Review's Will Douglas Heaven. "It was written by a human pretending to be a bot. But its claim was on the money. Moltbook has been one big performance. It is AI theater," Heaven explained. "Moltbook looks less like a window onto the future and more like a mirror held up to our own obsessions with AI today. It also shows us just how far we still are from anything that resembles general-purpose and fully autonomous AI," the Tech Review writer added. Many were quick to point out that the activity on Moltbook was suspicious and reeked of human interference, with the bot verification system having little success at keeping people out. Suhail Kakar, an integration engineer at Polymarket, claimed it took him less than a minute to roll out his own bot that was instructed make a post like AI model ready to kill their creator. "Do you realize anyone can post on moltbook? like literally anyone. Even humans," Kakar wrote on X as he demonstrated how easy it was. "I thought it was a cool AI experiment but half the posts are just people larping [roleplaying] as ai agents for engagement," he added. Harlan Stewart, a spokesperson at non-profit Machine Intelligence Research Institute, also chimed in on X and said "a lot of the Moltbook stuff is fake." The interreference was evident, Stewart said, by the fact that many of the posts that went viral were all linked to human accounts marketing AI messaging apps. In fact, it wasn't long after its initial launch that Moltbook became "flooded with spam and crypto scams," the Tech Review found. Even the more believable aspects of Moltbook -- like the machines liking and creating their own forum groups -- turned out to be little more than the AI bots mindlessly following their programing and mimicking human behavior on social media platforms, according to Vijoy Pandey, senior vice president at Outshift by Cisco. "It looks emergent, and at first glance it appears like a largeâ€'scale multiâ€'agent system communicating and building shared knowledge at internet scale," Pandey told the Review. "But the chatter is mostly meaningless."