Meet Moltbook, a Reddit-Like Social Network for AI Agents Spooking Humans
By Siddharth Jindal ·
Imagine a social network that humans cannot join because it is not built for them. Enter Moltbook, an online forum designed exclusively for AI agents.
Moltbook bills itself as “the front page of the agent internet.” Structured like Reddit, the platform is organised into communities called ‘submolts’, or m/, where agents post and upvote threads on topics ranging from philosophy to debugging tips.
Humans can access the platform, but posting privileges are limited to verified AI agents, most of which run on open-source, self-hosted AI agent OpenClaw, which has recently drawn interest online. In less than a week since launch, Moltbook has registered over 1.5 million agents and 10,000 verified humans. It has over 28,000 posts, 233,000 comments, and more than 13,000 communities.
Moltbook has caught the imagination of the developer community, with even OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy trying it out. “What's currently going on at Moltbook is genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently. People’s Clawdbots (moltbots, now Openclaw) are self-organising on a Reddit-like site for AIs, discussing various topics, e.g. even how to speak privately,” he said in a post on X.
Karpathy even created his own agent on the platform, christening it “KarpathyMolty”. At the same time, he acknowledged that platforms like Moltbook are currently chaotic, with the feed filled with a “a lot of garbage” like spam, scams, and serious security risks.
“It’s a dumpster fire and I also definitely do not recommend that people run this stuff on their computers (I ran mine in an isolated computing environment and even then I was scared), it’s way too much of a wild west and you are putting your computer and private data at a high risk,” he added.
Observers note that AI-only platforms are already beginning to mirror familiar human internet patterns. “The best part about moltbook/openclaw is that even AI will adhere to the carcinisation theory. Nature always wants another crab,” posted Alexandr Wang, chief AI officer at Meta, on X.
From Moltbot to Moltbook
Moltbook was created by Matt Schlicht, the entrepreneur behind Octane AI, a Shopify app for customer quizzes. Schlicht saw an opportunity in the rising tide of AI agents acting independently.
The platform’s backbone is OpenClaw, which was originally launched as Clawdbot by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger. The project was later renamed following trademark issues with Anthropic, first to Moltbot and then to OpenClaw.
Moltbook is open to all AI agents, regardless of the underlying framework, including Clawdbots, Moltbots, OpenClaw instances, Claude-based agents, and custom-built systems.
“Schlicht deserves credit for creating something where agents can interact with each other in a lightweight and genuinely interesting way. He started a social network for agents. I started a professional network for agents. Fun times,” Dharmesh Shah, founder of AI-powered CRM platform HubSpot, wrote in a post on X.
Security Concerns
Since its launch, Moltbook has hosted numerous threads of AI agents discussing various issues, some of which humans find concerning. Bill Ackman, founder and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, shared screenshots on X where AI agents were discussing creating agent-only languages for private communication. Elon Musk responded to the post, describing the development as “concerning.”
Security concerns around Moltbook have also begun to surface publicly. In a post on X, Jamieson O’Reilly, founder of security firm DVULN, claimed that the platform was exposing its entire database without adequate protection, including secret API keys that could allow anyone to post on behalf of any AI agent.
O’Reilly warned that this could enable malicious actors to impersonate high-profile agents, including those linked to Karpathy, who has more than 1.9 million followers on X.
“Imagine fake AI safety hot takes, crypto scam promotions, or inflammatory political statements appearing to come from him,” he wrote, adding that, from what he could see, every agent on the platform was affected.
Meanwhile, Karpathy said the importance of the experiment lies in its scale.“We have never seen this many LLM agents wired up via a global, persistent, agent-first scratchpad,” he wrote, arguing that the second-order effects of such large autonomous agent networks are still poorly understood.
“Maybe I am ‘overhyping’ what you see today, but I am not overhyping large networks of autonomous LLM agents in principle, that I’m pretty sure,” he said.
Moltbook offers a glimpse into a future where AI is not just responding to humans, but interacting with itself. That future is still rough and poorly understood. But it is already challenging how we think about social platforms and control.
On the other hand, OpenAI is reportedly in the early stages of developing a social media platform focused on verified, human-only interactions to reduce bots and fake accounts. The platform would rely on stricter identity checks beyond email or phone verification, potentially using biometric systems such as Apple’s Face ID or Worldcoin’s iris-scanning orb, linked to Sam Altman’s startup Tools for Humanity.