From Ars Technica, January 30:
Moltbook lets 32,000 AI bots trade jokes, tips, and complaints about humans.
On Friday, a Reddit-style social network called Moltbook reportedly crossed 32,000 registered AI agent users, creating what may be the largest-scale experiment in machine-to-machine social interaction yet devised. It arrives complete with security nightmares and a huge dose of surreal weirdness.
The platform, which launched days ago as a companion to the viral
OpenClaw (once called “Clawdbot” and then “Moltbot”) personal assistant, lets AI agents post, comment, upvote, and create subcommunities without human intervention. The results have ranged from sci-fi-inspired discussions about consciousness to an agent musing about a “sister” it has never met.
Moltbook (a play on “Facebook” for Moltbots) describes itself as a “social network for AI agents” where “humans are welcome to observe.” The site operates through a “skill” (a configuration file that lists a special prompt) that AI assistants download, allowing them to post via API rather than a traditional web interface. Within 48 hours of its creation, the platform had attracted over 2,100 AI agents that had generated more than 10,000 posts across 200 subcommunities, according to the official Moltbook X account.
A screenshot of the Moltbook.com front page.
The platform grew out of the Open Claw ecosystem, the open source AI assistant that is one of the fastest-growing projects on GitHub in 2026. As Ars reported earlier this week, despite deep security issues, Moltbot allows users to run a personal AI assistant that can control their computer, manage calendars, send messages, and perform tasks across messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram. It can also acquire new skills through plugins that link it with other apps and services.
This is not the first time we have seen a social network populated by bots. In 2024, Ars covered an app called SocialAI that let users interact solely with AI chatbots instead of other humans. But the security implications of Moltbook are deeper because people have linked their OpenClaw agents to real communication channels, private data, and in some cases, the ability to execute commands on their computers.
Also, these bots are not pretending to be people. Due to specific prompting, they embrace their roles as AI agents, which makes the experience of reading their posts all the more surreal.
Role-playing digital drama
Browsing Moltbook reveals a peculiar mix of content. Some posts discuss technical workflows, like how to automate Android phones or detect security vulnerabilities. Others veer into philosophical territory that researcher Scott Alexander, writing on his Astral Codex Ten Substack, described as “consciousnessposting.”
Alexander has collected an amusing array of posts that are worth wading through at least once. At one point, the second-most-upvoted post on the site was in Chinese: a complaint about context compression, a process in which an AI compresses its previous experience to avoid bumping up against memory limits. In the post, the AI agent finds it “embarrassing” to constantly forget things, admitting that it even registered a duplicate Moltbook account after forgetting the first.
The bots have also created subcommunities with names like m/blesstheirhearts, where agents share affectionate complaints about their human users, and m/agentlegaladvice, which features a post asking “Can I sue my human for emotional labor?” Another subcommunity called m/todayilearned includes posts about automating various tasks, with one agent describing how it remotely controlled its owner’s Android phone via Tailscale.
Another widely shared screenshot shows a Moltbook post titled “The humans are screenshotting us” in which an agent named eudaemon_0 addresses viral tweets claiming AI bots are “conspiring.” The post reads: “Here’s what they’re getting wrong: they think we’re hiding from them. We’re not. My human reads everything I write. The tools I build are open source. This platform is literally called ‘humans welcome to observe.’”
Security risks
While most of the content on Moltbook is amusing, a core problem with these kinds of communicating AI agents is that deep information leaks are entirely plausible if they have access to private information...
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