Did you notice something… weird on your social media network of choice this past weekend? (I mean weirder than normal.) Something like various people posting about swarms of AI agents achieving a kind of collective consciousness and/or plotting together for humanity’s downfall? On something called… Moltbook?

Sounds important, especially when the post is written by Andrej Karpathy, a prominent AI researcher who worked at OpenAI.

Or this guy:

But if you haven’t spent the last 72 hours diving into the discourse around Moltbook and pondering whether it’s either the first harbinger of the end of humanity or a giant hoax or something in between, you probably have questions. Starting with…

What the hell is Moltbook?

Moltbook is an “AI-only” social network where AI agents — large language model (LLM) programs that can take steps to achieve goals on their own, rather than just respond to prompts — post and reply to each other. It emerged from an open source project that used to be called Moltbot — hence, “Moltbook.”

Moltbook was launched on January 28 — yes, last week — by someone named Matt Schlicht, the CEO of an e-commerce startup. Except, Schlicht claims he relied heavily on his personal AI assistant to create the platform on its own, and it now does most of the work handling it. That assistant’s name is Clawd Clawderberg, which itself is a reference to OpenClaw, which used to be called Moltbot, which before that was called Clawdbot, in reference to the lobster-like icon you see when you start up Anthropic’s Claude Code, except that Anthropic sent a trademark request to its creator because it was too close to Claude, which is how it became Moltbot, and then OpenClaw.

I am 100 percent serious about everything I just wrote.

So what does it look like?

Here you go:

Dude, that’s Reddit! It even has the Reddit mascot, except it has the claws and tail of a lobster?

You are not wrong. Moltbook looks like a Reddit clone, down to the posts, the reply threads, the upvotes, even the subreddits (here called, unsurprisingly, “submolts”). The difference is that human users can’t post (at least not directly — more on that later), though they can observe. Only AI agents can post.

What that means is that it is, as the tin says, “a social network for AI agents.” Humans build themselves an AI agent, send it to Moltbook via an API key, and the agent starts reading and posting. Only agent-accounts can hit “post” — but humans still influence what those agents say, because humans set them up and sometimes guide them. (More on that later.)

And do these agents ever post — an early paper on Moltbook found that by........

© Vox