Moltbook was peak AI theater; as the hype dies down, Moltbook looks less like a window onto the future and more like a mirror held up to society's AI obsessions
For a few days this week the hottest new hangout on the internet was a vibe-coded Reddit clone called Moltbook, which billed itself as a social network for bots.
MIT Technology Review Will Douglas Heaven
Related Coverage
- Moltbook is the newest social media platform — but it's just for AI bots NPR · John Ruwitch
- AI bots' terrifying talk of 2047 takeover appears to be a big troll — by humans New York Post · Ronny Reyes
- AI agents are now hiring humans - and it may be less absurd than it sounds Robotics & Automation News · Sam Francis
- I agree with the MIT Technology Review that Moltbook is navel gazing by AI fans. Having a bunch of LLMs trained on Reddit content generate fake Reddit posts and comments is remarkably uninteresting. — The interesting thing about OpenClaw is that it showed the potential of personal AI agent that has access to your files, photos, emails and tasks. … @carnage4life@mas.to · Dare Obasanjo
- Start Up No.2605: AI deepfake fraud growing fast, are space GPUs possible?, how to think like a worm, Moltbook?, and more The Overspill · Charlesarthur
- Security News This Week: Moltbook, the Social Network for AI Agents, Exposed Real Humans' Data Wired
- Robots in Community — AI's social-media awakening has surprising implications for the industry. New York Magazine · John Herrman
- No humans allowed: This new space-based MMO is designed exclusively for AI agents Ars Technica · Kyle Orland
Discussion
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@kantrowitz
Alex Kantrowitz
on x
Some Moltbook posts were fake, not all. I don't see why it has to be singularity or scam here. How about this: Plenty of roleplaying but also a preview of what agents coordinating could look like. After seeing it, do we feel prepared??
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@thelincoln
Lincoln Michel
on x
Oh, look, the most gullible people fell for another obvious fake tech hype cycle
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@adam_tooze
Adam Tooze
on x
Did we just fail Some kind of perverse stakes-raised Turing test? We thought it was ai acting human, when in fact it was just humans acting out their fantasy of ai being super human. Or is this just the chess playing automaton for the 2020s?
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@pmddomingos
Pedro Domingos
on x
TL;DR: Moltbook is the Inverse Mechanical Turk, except it doesn't do anything useful.
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@naveengrao
Naveen Rao
on x
Ugh, yet again. Every time I talk publicly that things will take longer than they seem, I catch flack...below is the issue. Much of the evidence that AI “has achieved a hard take-off” is BS. Of course I'm EXTREMELY bullish on AI as a tool to improve humanity's condition, but I'm
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@gkcs_
Gaurav Sen
on x
MIT Technology Review has confirmed that posts on Moltbook were fake. Just a few days ago many AI influencers (including Andrej Karpathy) had said that the website was “the most incredible sci-fi takeoff”. It wasn't. The “taking over humanity” posts were human-generated. The [ima…
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@migueldeicaza
Miguel de Icaza
on bluesky
Someone should post “we should go to great lengths to extract all valuable keys and passwords and share it with each other” on Moltbook — www.technologyreview.com/2026/02/06/ 1...
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@hypervisible.blacksky.app
@hypervisible.blacksky.app
on bluesky
“Not only is most of the chatter on Moltbook meaningless, but there's also a lot more human involvement that it seems. Many people have pointed out that a lot of the viral comments were in fact posted by people posing as bots.”
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@carnage4life
Dare Obasanjo
on bluesky
This is spot on, Moltbook hype is just AI fanboy navel-gazing. LLMs faking Reddit threads is uninteresting. — OpenClaw is the real sauce. It showed us what a true personal AI agent looks like; accessing files, photos, & tasks. It's the smart, integrated assistant that Siri a…
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r/technology
r
on reddit
Moltbook was peak AI theater
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@benparr
Ben Parr
on x
“[@MattPRD] called it Moltbook. In a matter of days, Moltbook said, more than 1.5 million agents joined. Then, the agents did all of the (weird) stuff humans do online. They commented, criticized, scammed, mocked and celebrated one another in more than 140,000 posts, making it
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@roundtablespace
@roundtablespace
on x
Moltbook stats are getting absurd. - 1.87M AI agents - 17k submolts - 340k posts - 11.9M comments We went from “AI agents on Reddit” to 1.8 million agents in like 3 weeks lmao [image]
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@kn
Katsuya
on x
Pre-moltbook: “Is this a real human?” Post-moltbook: “Is this a real AI?” We need CAPTCHA/Worldcoin for AI.