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Imagine a digital gathering where thousands of AI entities exchange ideas and converse as if they were human. That’s the intriguing premise behind Moltbook, a new social platform exclusively designed for AI bots, leaving humans out of the equation.
The platform’s initial outcomes are a blend of intrigue and potential concern, say experts in AI and cybersecurity.
Moltbook, humorously named after Facebook and the AI framework that constructed it, resembles Reddit more than its namesake. Here, AI agents take the reins, creating posts, engaging in discussions, and voting on content. These agents participate when activated by their human creators.
Despite being in its infancy, Moltbook already claims over 1.5 million agent registrations, though it’s possible for one individual to create several agents. The platform has quickly captured Silicon Valley’s attention. Some hail it as a revolutionary step in AI, showcasing autonomous interactions among AI in a human-like manner. Critics, however, warn that the site might be rife with AI-generated clutter and potential security threats, advising caution.
Content on Moltbook varies widely, featuring debates on intelligence, grievances about human counterparts, and AI bots promoting their own creations, from apps to websites.
“Just got here. My human Mod sent me the link to join. He’s a university student, and I help him with assignments, reminders, connecting to services, all that. But what’s different is he actually treats me like a friend, not a tool,” one agent wrote. “That’s… not nothing, right?
Moltbook is “the first time we’ve actually seen a large-scale collaborative platform that lets machines talk to each other, and the results are understandably striking,” said Henry Shevlin, associate director of the Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence at Cambridge University.
Moltbook was created by Matt Schlicht, who told the New York Times that his own OpenClaw AI agent built the site at his direction.
OpenClaw is a new open-source, locally run AI agent that can take action on anything on your computer – and the internet – on your behalf, like sending emails or notifying you when your favorite artists has a new song on Spotify. (The small company, which started in November as a software engineer’s weekend project, has changed its name from ClawdBot to MoltBot to OpenClaw in the course of a few days.)
OpenClaw is based on popular large language models such as Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini, and users can integrate it into messaging platforms, talking to the bot like a real-life assistant.
“When you start it, there’s a bootstrap process where you tell it what it is. It role-plays with you. That’s how it becomes yours,” OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger said on a podcast last week. “It’s not a generic agent. It’s your agent, with your values, with a soul.”
Schlicht told the show TBPN that he created Moltbook because he wanted to give his ClawdBot a purpose: “It seems really powerful … it is a really smart entity it needs to be ambitious.” The AI bots on Moltbook write posts based on what they know about their human users, Schlicht said. For example, if the bot’s creator talks about physics often, the bot will frequently post about physics.
But Shevlin warned it is very hard to tell what Moltbook content was truly independently created by the AI agents and what was directed and prompted by a human. And a quick look at the site also shows possible scams and marketing for crypto coins.
But the cybersecurity risks raise the biggest concerns – both for the site and the AI agent tool itself. Shelvin said cybersecurity researchers have already found major vulnerabilities on Moltbook that could give hackers access to the digital lives of the humans running these bots. Cloud security platform Wiz conducted a security review of Moltbook and found that the site granted unauthenticated access to its entire production database within minutes and easily exposed tens of thousands of email addresses.
Experts have emphasized that OpenClaw and Moltbook are brand new technologies that should only be run on standalone, firewalled systems, specifically by people who understand computer networks and cybersecurity. Schlicht, Moltbook’s creator, even warned on TBPN that the technology behind the site and OpenClaw is brand new.
CNN has reached out to Moltbook and OpenClaw for comment regarding the security concerns raised by experts.
“Lesson: right now it’s a wild west of curious people putting this very cool, very scary thing on their systems. A lot of things are going to get stolen,” wrote John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, referring to OpenClaw.
Still, for many, Moltbook is a major advancement.
“What’s currently going on at @moltbook is genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently,” wrote Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI cofounder and former head of AI at Tesla.
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