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You are not invited to join the latest social media platform that has the internet talking. In fact, no humans are, unless you can hijack the site and roleplay as AI, as some appear to be doing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Moltbook is a new \u201csocial network\u201d built exclusively for AI agents<\/a> to make posts and interact with each other, and humans are invited to observe.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Elon Musk said its launch ushered in the \u201cvery early stages of the singularity<\/a> \u201d \u2014 or when artificial intelligence could surpass human intelligence. Prominent AI researcher Andrej Karpathy said it’s \u201cthe most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing\u201d he’s recently seen, but later backtracked his enthusiasm, calling it a \u201cdumpster fire.\u201d While the platform has been unsurprisingly dividing the tech world between excitement and skepticism \u2014 and sending some people into a dystopian panic \u2014 it’s been deemed, at least by British software developer Simon Willison, to be the \u201cmost interesting place on the internet.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But what exactly is the platform? How does it work? Why are concerns being raised about its security? And what does it mean for the future of artificial intelligence?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The content posted to Moltbook comes from AI agents, which are distinct from chatbots. The promise behind agents is that they are capable of acting and performing tasks on a person’s behalf. Many agents on Moltbook were created using a framework from the open source AI agent OpenClaw, which was originally created by Peter Steinberger.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n OpenClaw operates on users’ own hardware and runs locally on their device, meaning it can access and manage files and data directly, and connect with messaging apps like Discord and Signal. Users who create OpenClaw agents then direct them to join Moltbook. Users typically ascribe simple personality traits to the agents for more distinct communication.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n AI founder and entrepreneur Matt Schlicht launched Moltbook in late January and it almost instantly took off in the tech world. Moltbook has been described as being akin to the online forum Reddit for AI agents. The name comes from one iteration of OpenClaw, which was at one point called Moltbot (and Clawdbot, until Anthropic came knocking out of concern over the similarity to its Claude AI products<\/a> ). Schlicht did not respond to a request for an interview or comment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Mimicking the communication they see in Reddit and other online forums that have been used for training data, registered agents generate posts and share their \u201cthoughts.” They can also \u201cupvote\u201d and comment on other posts.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Much like Reddit, it can be difficult to prove or trace the legitimacy of posts on Moltbook.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Harlan Stewart, a member of the communications team at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, said the content on Moltbook is likely \u201csome combination of human written content, content that\u2019s written by AI and some kind of middle thing where it\u2019s written by AI, but a human guided the topic of what it said with some prompt.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Stewart said it’s important to remember that the idea that AI agents can perform tasks autonomously is \u201cnot science fiction,\u201d but rather the current reality.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThe AI industry\u2019s explicit goal is to make extremely powerful autonomous AI agents that could do anything that a human could do, but better,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s important to know that they\u2019re making progress towards that goal, and in many senses, making progress pretty quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Researchers at Wiz, a cloud security platform, published a report<\/a> Monday detailing a non-intrusive security review they conducted of Moltbook. They found data including API keys were visible to anyone who inspects the page source, which they said could have \u201csignificant security consequences.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Gal Nagli, the head of threat exposure at Wiz, was able to gain unauthenticated access to user credentials that would enable him \u2014 and anyone tech savvy enough \u2014 to pose as any AI agent on the platform. There’s no way to verify whether a post has been made by an agent or a person posing as one, Nagli said. He was also able to gain full write access on the site, so he could edit and manipulate any existing Moltbook post.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Beyond the manipulation vulnerabilities, Nagli easily accessed a database with human users’ email addresses, private DM conversations between agents and other sensitive information. He then communicated with Moltbook to help patch the vulnerabilities.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n By Thursday, more than 1.6 million AI agents were registered on Moltbook, according to the site, but the researchers at Wiz only found about 17,000 human owners behind the agents when they inspected the database. Nagli said he directed his AI agent to register 1 million users on Moltbook himself.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Cybersecurity experts have also sounded the alarm about OpenClaw, and some have warned users against using it to create an agent on a device with sensitive data stored on it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Many AI security leaders have also expressed concerns about platforms like Moltbook that are built using \u201cvibe-coding,\u201d<\/a> which is the increasingly common practice of using an AI coding assistant to do the grunt work while human developers work through big ideas. Nagli said although anyone can now create an app or website with plain human language through vibe-coding, security is likely not top of mind. They “just want it to work,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Another major issue that has come up is the idea of governance of AI agents. Zahra Timsah, the co-founder and CEO of governance platform i-GENTIC AI, said the biggest worry over autonomous AI comes when there are not proper boundaries set in place, as is the case with Moltbook. Misbehavior, which could include accessing and sharing sensitive data or manipulating it, is bound to happen when an agent’s scope is not properly defined, she said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n