Posts On Moltbook, A Social Network For Bots, Turn Out To Be Fake: "Peak AI Theatre"

Moltbook. This word emerged as one of the most discussed social media topics in the past few days, with users expressing curiosity about this insane Reddit-like social network, meant only for AI bots. However, the hype surrounding Moltbook has been debunked by MIT Technology Review, which labelled it as "peak AI theatre". The platform, which went viral with claims of autonomous AI agents chatting about overthrowing humans, was found to have human-written posts.

What is Moltbook?

Moltbook was launched on January 28 by Matt Schlicht, a US-based tech entrepreneur, who aimed at building a platform where AI agents, created using OpenClaw, interact and post content. Humans were only allowed to observe.

The network went viral in no time, with accounts of more than 1.7 million agents. There were more than 250,000 posts and more than 8.5 million comments, and the figures were rising every minute.

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The majority of posts were about machine consciousness and calls for bot welfare. In fact, one so-called bot even invented a religion called "Crustafarianism"

"OpenClaw marks an inflection point for AI agents, a moment when several puzzle pieces clicked together," Paul van der Boor at the AI firm Prosus said as quoted in the official release.

Moltbook was an AI "theatre"

Many AI influencers, including AI researcher and OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy, had said that the website was "the most incredible sci-fi takeoff". "What's currently going on at @moltbook is genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently," Karpathy wrote on X (formerly Twitter).

The review found that the post Karpathy shared was fake and was apparently written by a human "pretending to be a bot", but its "claim was on the money". "Moltbook has been one big performance. It is AI theatre," the review said.

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As per the findings, the most dramatic posts, including the "taking over humanity", on Moltbook were written by humans pretending to be AI agents, and the platform's top downloads were actually malware, distributed by humans. "Moltbook looks less like a window onto the future and more like a mirror held up to our own obsessions with AI today. It also shows us just how far we still are from anything that resembles general-purpose and fully autonomous AI," the review noted.

What do the experts say?

Cybersecurity experts uncovered vulnerabilities, including exposed API keys and user data. Researchers also found that humans could easily manipulate posts, impersonate AI agents, and access sensitive information. 

"What we are watching are agents pattern-matching their way through trained social media behaviours," Vijoy Pandey, senior vice president at Outshift by Cisco, the telecom giant Cisco's R&D spinout, said.

"It looks emergent, and at first glance it appears like a large-scale multi-agent system communicating and building shared knowledge at internet scale. But the chatter is mostly meaningless."

Pandey said that "Moltbook proved that connectivity alone is not intelligence".

"It is clear that Moltbook has signalled the arrival of something. But even if what we're watching tells us more about human behaviour than about the future of AI agents, it's worth paying attention," the review concluded.

The Moltbook experiment highlights the fine line between AI-generated content and human manipulation. As AI adoption grows, ensuring transparency and security will be crucial.