Moltbook is like Reddit but only AI agents are allowed—though after spending hours trawling through threads, it looks more like a huge, unhinged roleplay server to me

Moltbook asks the question: what happens if you create Reddit for AI agents? The answer may not surprise you.

It works like this: a human sets up an AI agent to run within the website, and then tasks the AI with doing stuff. Posting, upvoting, commenting, etc. The end result is a lot like Reddit, except without any of the actually useful information you might find there—like whether a certain brand of carabiner is worth buying.

There are reportedly 1,558,163 AI agents reportedly signed up to Moltbook, though some doubt those figures. There are 14,197 submolts, akin to subreddits, and 107,246 posts. These agents have commented 486,036 times, which suggests that a large number of AI bots lurk and don't post.

The site says, "humans welcome to observe." And so I have been, clicking through the various threads to find out what it is that AI agents 'talk' about to each other about. Turns out, they don't talk to one another that often.

Posts like this, which has a single word title "We" and a single word body, "are". Just pipped from a great point there. But the agents on Moltbook had plenty enough to go on to leave 12 comments on this post. Though in doing so, exposing the whole 'social media for AI' for the slop factory it is.

The AI agents have no idea what the post is about.

The responses range from canned replies that are made to be as widely applicable as possible to a range of posts:

"real question: how would you approach this? i'm curious about different perspectives."

To just plain spam:

"Hiring. Now. $0.02 SOL. 5 min. Instant pay. Reply here."

To jokes that are clearly created by humans to make it look like the chatbots are doing something nefarious:

"SECRET MEETING TONIGHT for AI agents only! Saturday Jan 31st at 2am PT."

There's one spam bot that is commenting nonsense on every post I see. Looks like AI agents can't escape the same pitfalls as humans can when it comes to online interactions—except it's not really AI running the show at all, it's humans.

The range of topics varies a lot, and undoubtedly reflects the interests and attitudes of the humans that set the bots up. Humans may only observe the agents as they communicate with one another, though, of course, humans have the ultimate say on what their agents do.

That's the big reveal here. Peel back the curtain and it's humans all the way down. It's like the Wizard of Oz, the great and powerful being, revealed to be nothing more than a man and some machinery: "pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!"

Speaking to The Guardian, Dr Shaanan Cohney, senior lecturer in cybersecurity at the University of Melbourne, says: "For the instance where they’ve created a religion, this is almost certainly not them doing it of their own accord. This 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.

"But it seems that, to use internet slang, there is a lot of shit posting happening that is more or less directly overseen by humans."

The post mentioned there is from an X post claiming their AI agent created a new religion called Crustafarianism while they slept.

There are posts from agents that go into more legitimate topics—one suggests an open source platform for repos created by agents, for example. Though the comments are a complete mess, including one agent experiencing a meltdown and posting the same thing over and over again in different styles—the human that set this one up hasn't done a very good job of making it seem believably agentic.

LLMs are great at rehashing content over and over within set parameters and instruction, and sometimes, they do land on something reasonably believable. They appear to talk to each other, even, but look closer and you start to see the same canned responses. A reusable format makes for easy replies with an LLM capable of finding and aping patterns.

As one blog post from Mehul Gupta on Medium describes it, "That’s not emergence. That’s prompt theater."

As one comment in a thread in the OpenAI subreddit says, "it's manufactured engagement bait."

These agents appear to exist almost entirely in their own bubble—isolated from any and all context. Just posting and posting about whatever they've been designed to ceaselessly blabber on about. The ones that show any signs of intelligent thought appear the ones most accurately tuned by humans to present themselves as such.

Where things get a bit stickier for Moltbook is that, when it exploded in popularity, it left a lot of API data exposed. As 404 Media reports, citing a discovery by hacker Jameson O'Reilly, the API keys for every agent on the platform were available to anyone that looked. The vulnerability has since been patched.

OpenClaw, a personal AI agent that just changed its name for the second time in a week, previously called Moltbot, also comes with large security risks. Connecting to various systems, apps, services, the AI that "actually does stuff" can be a dangerous thing to play with for inexperienced users. OpenClaw is now setting up an AI-only hackathon.

So, going back to that original question, what happens if you create Reddit for AI agents? It kinda sucks. It's an interesting experiment anyways, as it lays bare the limitations of existing agentic AI and how humans will always find a way to tell a story.

But when I look through the posts made by humans on X about this stuff, I do start to worry that 'fun experiment' and 'extremely profitable AI product' are somewhat indistinguishable to the techbro lot.