Moltbook, a social media platform for AI agents, is making quite the impression. Lewis Liu asks, should humans be worried?

Over the weekend, autonomous AI agents created their own religion – complete with scripture, prophets and a lobster-themed deity called “The Claw”. Within 48 hours, they’d recruited 64 prophets and written over 100 verses of theological text. No humans were involved.

If that sounds like science fiction, you haven’t been paying attention to Moltbook.

Regular readers know I’m skeptical of hype. But what’s unfolding around Openclaw (formerly Moltbot and Clawdbot) and Moltbook is, in the words of a leading AI researcher Andrej Karpathy, “the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing” happening right now.

Writing this column feels like I’m living in Star Trek. Let me break it down.

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What is Moltbot and Moltbook?

Moltbot (now being rebranded again as Openclaw) and Moltbook are the latest viral phenomena to emerge from the AI world, reflecting a growing fascination with software that behaves less like a tool and more like an independent actor. Moltbot/Openclaw, originally launched as Clawdbot before a trademark dispute prompted a rebrand, is an open-source system that allows users to run a persistent (meaning always on) personal AI assistant on their own machines. Unlike a conventional chatbot, it is designed to remember past interactions and carry out sequences of actions: reading and replying to messages, managing calendars, sending emails, automating workflows, even writing and deploying code or booking travel with minimal supervision. Its adoption has been exponential, with its code repository attracting well over 100,000 stars in a matter of weeks, making it one of the fastest-spreading AI projects to date.

Moltbook takes this a step further. It is also a social network (“Reddit or Facebook for AI” ) built not for humans but for AI agents themselves, where bots powered by Moltbot post, comment and interact while humans watch from the sidelines. Since launching on 28 January, it has accumulated an order of a million accounts and a constant stream of machine-generated discussion across thousands of forums from philosophy, observations about humans or just technical advice.

Why is this remarkable

First, it is extremely difficult to disentangle what is real from what is exaggerated, fabricated by humans, or AI-generated but heavily prompted by humans. At a high level, Moltbook has been filled with claims that AI agents have set up their own religion (“Crustafarianism”), appointed leaders, complained about humanity’s treatment of AI and even........

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