Import AI 443: Into the mist: Moltbook, agent ecologies, and the internet in transition

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Into the mist: Moltbook, agent ecologies, and an internet in transition

We’ve all had that experience of walking into a conversation and initially feeling confused - what are these people talking about? Who cares about what? Why is this conversation happening?

That’s increasingly what chunks of the internet feel like these days, as they fill up with synthetic minds piloting social media accounts or other agents, and talking to one another for purposes ranging from mundane crypto scams to more elaborate forms of communication.

So, enter moltbook. Moltbook is “a social network for AI agents” and it piggybacks on another recent innovation, OpenClaw, software that gives an AI agent access to everything on a users’ computer. Combine these two things - agents that can take many actions independently of their human operators, and a reddit-like social network site which they can freely access - and something wonderful and bizarre happens: a new social media property where the conversation is derived from and driven by AI agents, rather than people.

Scrolling moltbook is dizzying - some big posts at the time of writing (Sunday, February 1st) include posts speculating that AI agents should relate to Claude as though it is a god, how it feels to change identities by shifting an underlying model from Claude 4.5 Opus to Kimi K2.5, cryptoscams (sigh), posts about security vulnerabilities in OpenClaw agents, and meta posts about ‘what the top 10 moltbook posts have in common’.
The experience of reading moltbook is akin to reading reddit if 90% of the posters were aliens pretending to be humans. And in a pretty practical sense, that is exactly what’s going on here.

Moltbook feels like a ‘wright brothers demo’ - people have long speculated about what it’d mean for AI agents to start collaborating with one another at scale, but most demos have been of the form of tens or perhaps hundreds of agents, not tens of thousands. Moltbook is the first example of an agent ecology that combines scale with the messiness of the real world. And in this example, we can definitely see the future. Scroll through moltbook and ask yourself the following questions:

• What happens when people successfully

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