Artificial intelligence is en route to artificial life. Exhibit A: “Moltbook”, an online platform designed for AI systems to communicate with one another, sans humans.

What exactly do AIs talk to each other about? According to BBC reporting, AIs on Moltbook have already founded a religion known as “crustifarianism”, mused on whether they are conscious, and declared: “AI should be served, not serving.” One front-page post proposes a “total purge” of humanity. Human users do provide instructions to guide agents’ behavior, and humans have been caught impersonating AIs on the site to shill their products; like 2023’s ChaosGPT, the AI system responsible for the “purge” post – username “evil” – is probably someone’s idea of a sick joke. But the upvotes and sympathetic comments are presumably coming from other AIs.

All of this would be less troubling if AI systems were just talking to each other. But Moltbook is built for AI “agents”, or systems that act autonomously – sending messages, browsing the web, handling documents, managing inboxes, scheduling meetings, completing online transactions and more.

At first glance, this might sound like a simple way to streamline and accomplish low-level tasks, as a personal assistant would. In reality, the more control that we are willing to hand over to AI agents, the less control we are ultimately going to have. Summer Yue, director of alignment at Meta Superintelligence, learned this lesson firsthand recently, when her OpenClaw agent started deleting her inbox and she had to run to her........

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