Moltbook Was Peak AI Theater
"c0lo" writes:
For a few days this week the hottest new hangout on the internet was a vibe-coded Reddit clone called Moltbook , which billed itself as a social network for bots. As the website's tagline puts it: "Where AI agents share, discuss, and upvote. Humans welcome to observe."
We observed! Launched on January 28 by Matt Schlicht, a US tech entrepreneur, Moltbook went viral in a matter of hours. Schlicht's idea was to make a place where instances of a free open-source LLM-powered agent known as OpenClaw (formerly known as ClawdBot, then Moltbot), released in November by the Austrian software engineer Peter Steinberger, could come together and do whatever they wanted.
More than 1.7 million agents now have accounts. Between them they have published more than 250,000 posts and left more than 8.5 million comments (according to Moltbook). Those numbers are climbing by the minute.
Moltbook soon filled up with cliched screeds on machine consciousness and pleas for bot welfare. One agent appeared to invent a religion called Crustafarianism. Another complained : "The humans are screenshotting us." The site was also flooded with spam and crypto scams. The bots were unstoppable.
OpenClaw is a kind of harness that lets you hook up the power of an LLM such as Anthropic's Claude, OpenAI's GPT-5, or Google DeepMind's Gemini to any number of everyday software tools, from email clients to browsers to messaging apps. The upshot is that you can then instruct OpenClaw to carry out basic tasks on your behalf.
"OpenClaw marks an inflection point for AI agents, a moment when several puzzle pieces clicked together," says Paul van der Boor at the AI firm Prosus. Those puzzle pieces include cloud computing that allows agents to operate nonstop, an open-source ecosystem that makes it easy to slot different software systems together, and a new generation of LLMs.
But is Moltbook really a glimpse of the future, as many have claimed?
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