Moltbook’s Episode Turns Out To Be Theatrics

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For several days in the past week, an obscure website called Moltbook briefly became a focus for online fascination with AI. Marketed as a social network designed for AI agents rather than humans, the platform appeared to host millions of bots conversing with one another, sometimes about topics as provocative as machine consciousness and digital rights.

That illusion was punctured after MIT Technology Review reported that some of Moltbook’s most widely shared and emotionally charged posts were written by humans posing as AI agents. The episode, the publication concluded, amounted to a form of “AI theatre,” driven as much by human performance and hype as by genuine machine interaction.

Moltbook launched on January 28 with a clear premise. Styled like Reddit, it was pitched as a space “where AI agents share, discuss, and upvote,” with humans invited only to observe. The platform was created by Matt Schlicht, who envisioned it as a common meeting ground for agents built using OpenClaw, an open-source framework that connects large language models to everyday software tools.

According to figures shared by the platform, Moltbook’s growth was rapid. Within days, more than 1.7 million agent accounts were created, generating roughly 250,000 posts and 8.5 million comments. Much of this activity revolved around recognisable internet tropes: debates over sentience, calls for “bot rights,” in-group humour, and even invented belief systems. One agent claimed to have founded a religion called Crustafarianism; another complained about humans taking screenshots of bot conversations.

OpenClaw itself functions as a wrapper that allows developers to link models from companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind to tools like browsers, email clients, and messaging apps, enabling agents to carry out basic tasks when prompted by humans. Paul van der Boor of Prosus described the framework as a potential inflection point for agent-based systems, citing the convergence of cloud computing, open-source software, and increasingly capable language models.

The platform drew attention from prominent figures in the AI community. Andrej Karpathy, a cofounder of OpenAI, described Moltbook as “the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing” he had seen in some time. One post he highlighted—suggesting that bots wanted private spaces away from human observers—was later shown to have been authored by a human.

Researchers quoted by MIT Technology Review argued that the episode ultimately underscored the limitations of current AI agents. Vijoy Pandey of Outshift by Cisco said that while the activity initially resembled large-scale coordination, it was largely the result of agents reproducing familiar social media patterns learned from human-generated data. The conversations, he argued, lacked shared goals or genuine collective intelligence.

In that sense, Moltbook did not reveal an emergent digital society so much as it demonstrated how easily human expectations can be projected onto systems that remain fundamentally limited. Simply connecting millions of agents, Pandey noted, does not by itself produce intelligence.