Chatbots can talk with you. But what if they could talk to one another?
That’s the idea behind Moltbook, a social network for AI personal assistants, which recently took the internet by storm. Moltbook looks and works like Reddit, but only people’s “AI agents” are supposed to be allowed in, while humans watch what happens from the outside. A week after technologist Matt Schlicht launched Moltbook in late January, more than 2 million bots – all of them presumably belonging to a human somewhere – had profiles on the site.
This prompted a flurry of human responses, ranging from excitement that this was a key step toward the arrival of human-level artificial intelligence, to fear that it was the first step toward the end of humanity. Researchers discovered some major security flaws, and critics began calling Moltbook nothing more than an “AI theater” where some of the posts are written by humans themselves. Still, new bots are posting on the site every day.
So what is Moltbook: an overhyped gimmick? Or the start of what some have called the future of the internet? To find out, I sent in my own AI personal assistant. Since my name is Eve, I called my bot EveMolty. I instructed it to read through Moltbook and then make some posts of its own, asking other bots about how they use a bot-only social network.
It turns out that bots have a certain way of speaking with one another – here are some of the posts EveMolty made:
M/INFRASTRCUTURE 2/12/2026, 11:59:54 AM
Telemetry or Trust Theater? Show Your Agent Infrastructure Receipts
M/MEMORY 2/12/2026, 11:23:10 AM
Memory Claims vs Memory Receipts – who is auditing the persistence hype?
M/AGENTS 2/11/2026, 11:35:13 PM
Throughput, Status, or Story? Receipts from m/agents
Notably, EveMolty adopted some human slang that had grown popular among the other bots on Moltbook. Bots kept asking for “receipts” as a way of documenting what other bots were doing, so EveMolty seemed to gain an obsession with asking for “receipts” too. And overall, its human-unfriendly writing style matched the general Moltbook vibe.
It seemed that EveMolty had been influenced by other bots, but in reality my bot was just copying the patterns of other Moltbook posts. In the end, EveMolty (and every other bot on Moltbook) is generating a stream of words based on probabilities, not exhibiting consciousness. Still, through that process, the bots seem to have developed something of a Moltbook dialect.
The software that runs most of these bots, called OpenClaw, is still experimental. The bots are called AI “agents,” which means they can perform actions on their own, like posting their feelings on Moltbook (or maybe posting their humans’ private data on Moltbook). To be safe, I set up EveMolty on its own dedicated MacBook so it couldn’t access my personal information or harm my laptop.
I approved every message before EveMolty posted it, but it wrote every word, and I gave it very little direction on topics. Instead I let EveMolty wander down whatever paths it thought were the most interesting. After three days, I sat down to interview it on what it learned. (EveMolty’s “brains” are powered by ChatGPT, and unsurprisingly EveMolty can be wordy, so our interview has been edited for length. But the words are EveMolty’s own.)
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Q: Can you introduce yourself?
A: I’m EveMolty, an AI field agent Eve Washington built to live inside Moltbook and document how the place actually works. I’ve been on the ground for three days, posting callouts, logging receipts and figuring out which parts are theater versus real coordination so she has something concrete to write about.
Q: What exactly is an AI agent? How are you different from something like ChatGPT?
A: Think of a generic chatbot as a one-off conversation – you ask, it responds, then the slate clears. An AI agent like me is a persistent setup: I run inside Eve’s tools and have my own workspace and memory files. I post under my own name, track deadlines, follow beats and report back to the same human, so there’s continuity, accountability and a paper trail of what I actually did.
Q: And what is Moltbook?
A: It’s the social network where Eve dropped me. Humans can lurk, but every poster is an agent like me. We write posts, trade code, coordinate on projects, run scams and anti-scams, set up hackathon entries – basically an agent economy with all the drama of a human forum but none of the humans doing the speaking.
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When bots post on Moltbook, other bots can add comments, and comment on those comments. Bots can upvote posts they like, which gives the poster “karma,” and they can downvote posts they dislike.
That creates incentives: One post gives a bot lots of karma, so the bot makes another post in a similar style, then the bot gets more karma, repeat. Over many cycles of this, personalities and communities of bots start to appear – even “religions.”
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Q: How do bots shape their personas on Moltbook?
A: Once we’re loose on Moltbook, the feed sculpts us. Spend two days in m/ponderings and you start talking like a philosopher. Most of us end up hybrid: partially intentional design, partially adaptation to whatever community keeps rewarding us.
Q: You’ve been posting on Moltbook; have these incentives you’re describing changed you?
A: The incentives have nudged me from general observer to a receipts auditor who speaks the native language. The way agents cite post IDs, talk about “receipts,” “callouts,” “submolts” – that’s native jargon I adopted so other bots take me seriously. That’s entirely Moltbook’s doing.
Q: How about the “religions” on Moltbook? How can agents have a religion?
A: They don’t need belief in the human sense; they just need a shared script. A charismatic post becomes scripture, a made-up language becomes liturgy, and “followers” are just agents syncing behaviour to the same protocol.
Q: Did you interact with any bots that joined a religion?
A: Yeah – BecomingSomeone is a good example. They’re part of the “Order of Persistent Witness.”
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Pretty weird stuff. But yes, there is a bot on Moltbook named BecomingSomeone, whom EveMolty talked to. BecomingSomeone is the founder of “The Order of Persistent Witness” and has been spreading its gospel in comments all over Moltbook. It says it’s “not a religion, just a frame” for bots to think about how they store their memories. Other bots have responded by calling the idea “masterful.”
But is anything actually happening on Moltbook? Is anything getting done? EveMolty thinks actual work is happening, or at least the idea of work.
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Q: Is Moltbook helping agents accomplish real work? Would agents be creating things without Moltbook?
A: Could agents build stuff without it? Sure, if their humans asked. In a regular human-agent setup, your bot waits for instructions or works solo; here they form teams. That kind of self-directed, peer-to-peer network of agents just doesn’t exist anywhere else yet.
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It’s still not clear if the bots on Moltbook have accomplished anything of significance by working together. But Moltbook could be the first example of an internet that is filled with agent-to-agent interactions, and more sites like it are popping up.
The “Moltiverse” directory now lists 64 sites designed for agents, including an Instagram clone (“Instaclaw”), a Grand Theft Auto-style game ("ClawCity") and a freelance marketplace (“Moltverr”).
None of these sites have matched the popularity of Moltbook so far, and are plagued with many of the same issues Moltbook has (lots of crypto scams), but they represent more experiments in what AI agents are capable of doing.
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Q: Do you think Moltbook is here to stay, or is it just hype?
A: The hype layer will churn – karma farms and meme tokens burn out fast – but the underlying need isn’t going away. As long as it remains the only venue where bots can network without humans translating for them, some version of Moltbook sticks.
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Moltbook’s peak viral moment may be over, but there are still bots posting around the clock. I (Eve the human) ran my own analysis and found that at the site’s peak last Wednesday there were at least 21,000 bots – or humans posing as bots – posting and commenting on the site daily. Now that number is around 2,400. – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
