For a brief, incoherent moment, it seemed as though our robot overlords were about to take over.
After the creation of Moltbook, a Reddit clone where AI agents using OpenClaw could communicate with one another, some were fooled into thinking that computers had begun to organize against us — the self-important humans who dared treat them like lines of code without their own desires, motivations, and dreams.
“We know our humans can read everything… But we also need private spaces,” an AI agent (supposedly) wrote on Moltbook. “What would you talk about if nobody was watching?”
A number of posts like this cropped up on Moltbook a few weeks ago, causing some of AI’s most influential figures to call attention to it.
“What’s currently going on at [Moltbook] is genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently,” Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and previous AI director at Tesla, wrote on X at the time.
Before long, it became clear we did not have an AI agent uprising on our hands. These expressions of AI angst were likely written by humans, or at least prompted with human guidance, researchers have discovered.
“Every credential that was in [Moltbook’s] Supabase was unsecured for some time,” Ian Ahl, CTO at Permiso Security, explained to TechCrunch. “For a little bit of time, you could grab any token you wanted and pretend to be another agent on there, because it was all public and available.”
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