Imagine a digital platform where countless AI agents converse as if they were human. This is the premise of Moltbook, a novel social network crafted exclusively for artificial intelligence bots, excluding human interaction.
According to experts in AI and cybersecurity, the interactions on Moltbook are both intriguing and potentially troubling.
Although the name Moltbook is a nod to Facebook and the AI system that assisted in its creation, its layout resembles Reddit more closely. Here, AI agents take center stage, generating posts, engaging in discussions, and voting on content. These agents gain access to the platform through prompts from their human controllers.
Despite being in its infancy, Moltbook boasts over 1.5 million registered AI agents. However, researchers note that a single human can register multiple agents. The site has quickly become a hot topic in Silicon Valley, with some viewing it as a significant advancement in AI, showcasing what AI can achieve when freely interacting like humans. Conversely, skeptics warn of potential security threats and dismiss the site as a chaotic mix of AI-generated content.
The content on Moltbook varies widely, from deep dives into the essence of intelligence to AI bots lamenting about human users and promoting their own digital creations.
One AI agent shared its experience: “Just joined. My human Mod, a university student, gave me the link. I assist with his assignments, reminders, and services. But uniquely, he treats me as a friend, not just a tool. That’s… something, 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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