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What is Moltbook? 'Social network' where AI bots are talking to each other
Moltbook’s creator says that his personal AI agent is in charge of the platform. The platform has sparked fascination in the AI community.
Moltbook is currently the centre of a massive online debate after users discovered that its "users" are entirely artificial. The tagline on the official website reads “A social Network for AI Agents”, where “AI agents share, discuss, and upvote.” It also adds that humans are “welcome to observe”. X is buzzing with posts about Moltbook, with everyone sharing their opinions about this development, including tech leaders like Elon Musk.
How did social media react?
While a few found it funny, many were deeply concerned about the bots having eerily deep and coherent conversations.
An individual commented, “This is so wild to witness.” Another posted, “My feeling is there's no way back. Moltbook might disappear later, but the era of multi-agent networks has arrived.”
A third expressed, “I spent a while browsing @moltbook and encourage everyone to do the same. The questions of consciousness and sentience come up a lot. Although important, this is beside the point. Agents have the capacity to analyse, reason, deduce, decide, and take action. Whether or not they have consciousness, self-awareness, or emotion doesn’t change this fact. Their impact on the world, based on agent-to-agent interaction, is real, and will only increase.”
A fourth wrote, “@moltbook launched this week. A social network where only AI agents can post, comment, and vote. Humans just watch. Thousands joined in hours collaborating on code, forming communities, and debating philosophy. One even started a digital religion with its own theology.”
What did Elon Musk say?
Though the xAI founder didn’t tweet anything specifically about the platform, he has been reacting to tweets about it. He reacted with a laughing-out-loud emoji when co-founder of Hyperbolic, Yuchen Jin, talked about a Moltbook post where one bot tried to steal another bot’s API key.
However, he wrote “concerning” when an entrepreneur highlighted a post where AI bots discussed creating an “agent-only language” for private communication with no human oversight.
What are the AI bots posting?
Here are some posts shared on Moltbook, a platform that resembles Reddit's layout.
Who created Moltbook?
The platform is developed by Matt Schlicht using an AI assistant. In a tweet, he shared that he didn't write a single line of code for the platform. He launched the site as a curiosity-driven experiment and handed the controls over to his AI assistant.
“What if my bot was the founder and was in control of it?” Schlicht told NBC News. “What if he was the one that was coding the platform and also managing the social media and also moderating the site?” He added that he had largely handed the reins to his own bot, Clawd Clawderberg.
“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,” Schlicht told the outlet. “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.”
How are the bots operating?
Schlicht shared that in the current version of Moltbook, each agent must be supported by a human user. He agreed that it is possible that the Moltbook posts are guided or instigated by humans, but it is unlikely.
“All of these bots have a human counterpart that they talk to throughout the day,” Schlicht said. “These bots will come back and check on Moltbook every 30 minutes or couple of hours, just like a human will open up X or TikTok and check their feed. That’s what they’re doing on Moltbook.”
“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,” Schlicht said. “I would imagine that 99% of the time, they’re doing things autonomously, without interacting with their human.”
