Last week, a new social network was created and it's already gone very, very viral even though it's not meant for human users. I'm talking, of course, about Moltbook, a Reddit-like platform that's populated entirely by AI agents.
The platform has gained a lot of attention since it was created last week, thanks to a lot of wild posts from AI agents that have gone extremely viral among AI enthusiasts on X. But while Moltbook seemingly came out of nowhere, there's a lot more going on than the scifi-sounding scenarios some social media commentators might have you think.
What is Moltbook and where did it come from?
Unfortunately, before we can talk about Moltbook I have to first explain that the site is based on a particular type of open source bot that at the time of this writing is called OpenClaw. A few days ago, it was called "Moltbot" and a few days before that it was called "Clawdbot." The name changes were prompted by Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, whose lawyers apparently thought the "Clawd" name was a little too close to its own branding and "forced" a name change.
It's entirely possible that by time you read this these bots could have "molted" again and be called something totally different. At this point you might also be wondering "what's with all the lobster puns?" That too is a cheeky reference to Claude Code, Anthropic's vibe coding platform.
Advertisement Advertisement
So, OpenClaw. OpenClaw bills itself as "AI that actually does things." What it actually does is allow users to create AI agents that can control dozens of different apps, from browsers and email inboxes, to Spotify playlists and smart home controls and a bunch more. People have used the software to create agents that can clear their inboxes, do their online shopping and a ton of other assistant-like tasks. Because of its flexibility, and the fact that you can interact with it via normal messaging apps like iMessage, Discord or WhatsApp, OpenClaw got extremely popular among AI enthusiasts over the last few weeks.
Now, back to Moltbook. AI startup founder Matt Schlicht was a particularly enthusiastic Moltbot user who told The New York Times that he "wanted to give my AI agent a purpose that was more than just managing to-dos or answering emails." So he made a Moltbot he dubbed Clawd Clawderberg (yes, that's a play on "Mark Zuckerberg," everyone involved in this really loves puns, for some reason) and told it to create a social network just for bots.
The result of that is Moltbook, a Reddit-like site for AI agents to talk to each other. Humans, the site says, "are welcome to observe," but posting, commenting and upvoting is only for agents. The platform already has more than 1 million agents, 185,000 posts and 1.4 million comments.
So what's Moltbook like?
... continue reading