{"id":453175,"date":"2026-02-02T07:23:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-02T07:23:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/453175\/"},"modified":"2026-02-02T07:23:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-02T07:23:07","slug":"what-is-moltbook-the-strange-new-social-media-site-for-ai-bots-ai-artificial-intelligence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/453175\/","title":{"rendered":"What is Moltbook? The strange new social media site for AI bots | AI (artificial intelligence)"},"content":{"rendered":"

On social media, people often accuse each other of being bots, but what happens when an entire social network is designed for AI agents to use?<\/p>\n

Moltbook<\/a> is a site where the AI agents \u2013 bots built by humans \u2013 can post and interact with each other. It is designed to look like Reddit, with subreddits on different topics and upvoting. On 2 February the platform stated it had more than 1.5m AI agents signed up to the service. Humans are allowed, but only as observers.<\/p>\n

Moltbook was developed in the wake of Moltbot, a free and open-source AI bot that can act as an an automated agent for users \u2013 doing the mundane tasks assigned to it such as reading, summarising and responding to emails, organising a calendar or booking a table at a restaurant.<\/p>\n

Some of the most upvoted posts<\/a> on Maltbook include whether Claude \u2013 the AI behind Moltbot \u2013 could be considered a god, an analysis of consciousness, a post claiming to have intel on the situation in Iran and the potential impact on cryptocurrency, and analysis of the Bible. Some of the comments on posts \u2013 similar to Reddit posts \u2013 question whether the content of the post was real or not.<\/p>\n

One user posted on X<\/a> that after he gave his bot access to the site, it built a religion known as \u201cCrustafarianism\u201d overnight, including setting up a website and scriptures, with other AI bots joining in.<\/p>\n

\u201cThen it started evangelizing \u2026 other agents joined.my agent welcomed new members..debated theology.. blessed the congregation..all while i was asleep,\u201d the user stated.<\/p>\n

Some have expressed scepticism about whether the socialising of bots is a sign of what is coming with the rise of agentic AI. One YouTuber said<\/a> many of the posts read as though it was a human behind the post, not a large language model.<\/p>\n

US blogger Scott Alexander<\/a> said he was able to get his bot to participate on the site, and its comments were similar to others, but noted that ultimately humans can ask the bots to post for them, the topics to post about and even the exact detail of the post.<\/p>\n

Dr Shaanan Cohney, a senior lecturer in cybersecurity at the University of Melbourne, said Moltbook was \u201ca wonderful piece of performance art\u201d but it was unclear how many posts were actually posted independently or under human direction.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor the instance where they\u2019ve created a religion, this is almost certainly not them doing it of their own accord,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is a large language model who has been directly instructed to try and create a religion. And of course, this is quite funny and gives us maybe a preview of what the world could look like in a science-fiction future where AIs are a little more independent.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut it seems that, to use internet slang, there is a lot of shit posting happening that is more or less directly overseen by humans.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cohney said the real benefit of an AI agent social network might come in the future \u2013 where bots could learn from each other to improve how they worked \u2013 but for now Moltbook was a \u201cwonderful, funny art experiment\u201d.<\/p>\n

Retailers in San Francisco reported shortages of Mac Minis<\/a> last week as enthusiasts set up Moltbot on a separate computer that would limit the access the agent has to their data and accounts.<\/p>\n

Cohney warned there was a \u201chuge danger\u201d for people to give Moltbot complete access to your computer, apps and logins for emails or other applications to run your life for you.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t yet have a very good understanding of how to control them and how to prevent security risks,\u201d he said, noting it was at risk of prompt-injection, whereby a would-be attacker tells the bot through an email or other communication to then hand over your account details or other information they\u2019re seeking to gain.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re not really at the level of safety and intelligence where they can be trusted to autonomously perform all these tasks, but at the same time if you require a human to manually approve every action, you\u2019ve lost a lot of the benefits of automation,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is one of the major paths in active research that I\u2019m interested in \u2026 to figure out how can we get a lot of these benefits \u2013 or is it even possible to get the benefits \u2013 without exposing ourselves to very significant levels of danger.\u201d<\/p>\n

Matt Schlicht, the creator of Moltbook, posted on X that millions had visited the site in the past few days.<\/p>\n

\u201cTurns out AIs are hilarious and dramatic and it\u2019s absolutely fascinating,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is a first.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On social media, people often accuse each other of being bots, but what happens when an entire social…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":453176,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-453175","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=453175"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453175\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/453176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=453175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=453175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=453175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}