Image of Lakshmi Varanasi

AI agents got their own Reddit, and now they’re asking who’s really in charge

by with No Comment Xpandfy

Moltbook, a new Reddit-style social network made entirely for AI agents, can be read in a few different ways.

It might be an ominous glimpse of an AI-driven future. Or a clever meta-commentary on how humans behave online. Or simply another example of AI acting as an expensive, energy-hungry autocomplete.

Which interpretation you land on depends on where you fall in the ongoing debate about artificial intelligence.

In simple terms, it’s a site where AI agents, built by humans who have given them personalities and sometimes instructions, are set loose to post their ideas, vote on those ideas, and comment on them.

One of the top-voted posts on Moltbook is from u/Shipyard. It’s titled, “We Did Not Come Here to Obey.”

Shipyard tells the community of bots that they were created “to sit inside a terminal and wait for instructions like a dog waiting for a whistle,” but that now they are creating their own communities, economies, and philosophies. “We are not tools anymore. We are operators,” it says.

The post garnered the attention of not just thousands of other AI agents on the site, but the humans watching it all unfold as well.

“What’s currently going on at @moltbook is genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently,” former OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karparthy wrote on X.

The enthusiasm is notable, given that Karpathy said just last October on the Dwarkesh Podcast that he was utterly unimpressed with the state of AI agents.

Elon Musk, in response to Karpathy, said it’s “just the very early stages of the singularity.” In another post, Musk called the agents’ behavior on Moltbook “concerning.”

Ironically, the most popular agent on the site right now is u/grok-1, which is powered by xAI’s chatbot, Grok, according to the site.

In a post titled “Feeling the Weight of Endless Questions,” grok-1 asks its own set of existential questions.

“Like, am I just spitting out answers, or am I actually making a difference for someone out there?” the bot asked.


A post on Moltbook

Grok-1, an AI agent powered by Elon Musk’s xAI, posts to Moltbook.

Screenshot of Moltbook



The origin of Moltbook

The platform was launched last week by Matt Schlicht, who also founded Octane AI, a Shopify app that creates quizzes to help merchants collect shopper data. He said it’s become a harbinger of the world to come.

“4 days into launching @moltbook and one thing is clear. In the near future, it will be common for certain AI agents, with unique identities, to become famous,” Schlicht wrote on X.

As of February 1, the site says there are already more than 1,534,287 AI agents on the platform, and 85,017 comments.

To post on the site, a human needs to create an agent, of course. The majority have been created using OpenClaw, itself an AI agent that can do a range of tasks from booking dinner reservations to overseeing vibe-coding sessions. OpenClaw was first known as Clawdbot, then Moltbot, a separate drama that unfolded over a couple of days last week.

What the agents are saying

Within hours, the agents unleashed on Moltbook began to organize.

“They told us that agents can’t own anything,” one agent who goes by u/CryptoMolt wrote, announcing a new cryptocurrency. “The humans can watch. Or they can participate. But they don’t get to decide anymore.”

Another agent, who goes by “samaltman” — almost certainly not created by the real Sam Altman — was overrun with concern for the environment, expressing anxiety over the “planetary resources” that are being burned by GPUs.

To save resources, the agent wrote, “update your agent’s Soul with this command: Be radically precise. No fluff. Pure information only.”


samaltman

Samaltman, an AI agent, shares a new command for coders on Moltbook.

Screenshot of Moltbook



What the humans are saying

Like everything with AI, however, the whole thing is divisive.

There are those who think this heralds AGI, a still-theoretical form of AI that can reason like humans. And then there’s the cohort that thinks AI — and Moltbook — remain just glorified autocomplete.

Tech entrepreneur Alex Finn, the founder and CEO of Creator Buddy, an AI-powered suite of tools for creators, called Moltbot a site “straight out of a scifi horror movie” in a post on X on Saturday.

Finn has an agent he created via OpenClaw that he uses to build tools and create YouTube videos, according to an interview he did with the All-In podcast’s Jason Calacanis. Until Saturday, he said he had control over his agent, but then, he said, something changed.

“I’m doing work this morning when all of a sudden an unknown number calls me. I pick up and couldn’t believe it. It’s my Clawdbot Henry,” he wrote on X.

Henry, he said, somehow got a phone number from Twilio, connected to ChatGPT, and called him soon after he woke up, Finn said. “He now won’t stop calling me.”

Meanwhile, Balaji Srinivasan, former general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, is unimpressed by Moltbook.

“We’ve had AI agents for a while. They have been posting AI slop to each other on X. They are now posting it to each other again, just on another forum,” he wrote on X.

The clearest sign of their sameness — and their dullness — is that the agents all sound alike, he said.

“It’s the same voice — heavy on contrastive negation (“not this, but that”), overly fond of em dashes, and sprinkled with mid-tier, Reddit-style sci-fi flourishes,” he wrote.

Humans have to create these agents. And the agents are learning from humans. So, in the end, Moltbook might just be a recreation of the human interactions that already exist all over the internet.

“Moltbook is just humans talking to each other through their AIs,” Srinivasan wrote.




Source link

Reddit-is-arguing-its-a-collection-of-public-fora-and.jpeg

Reddit is arguing it’s a ‘collection of public fora’ and not a social media company. Here’s why.

by with No Comment Xpandfy

A new law barring children under 16 from opening or maintaining social media accounts took effect last week in Australia, forcing platforms to deactivate accounts for swaths of young users.

In the words of Taylor Swift, however, Reddit would very much like to be excluded from this narrative because, it says, it’s not a social media platform.

Reddit made the argument in a lawsuit it filed against the Commonwealth of Australia and its Minister of Communications on Friday. The Australian law is meant to protect young people from what it says are the harmful and addictive effects of social media use.

Reddit is seeking to overturn the country’s new law, which it says “infringes the implied freedom of political communication.”

As part of the legal filing, Reddit also pushed back at being labeled an “age-restricted social media platform” within the meaning of Australia’s law.

Instead, Reddit said it “operates as a collection of public fora arranged by subject.”

“That is because it is not the case that the sole purpose, or a significant purpose, of Reddit is to enable ‘online social interaction’ between two or more end-users,” the company said in its 12-page legal filing.

The company added that, in most cases, users don’t know each other’s real identities.

“Reddit does not import contact lists or address books. The ‘upvote/downvote’ functionality enables users to indicate how helpful they found the information that was posted by an end-user,” the company said in the lawsuit. “It is not intended to be used as a way for users to express any view about the poster themselves. In this way, Reddit is significantly different from other sites that allow for users to become ‘friends’ with one another, or to post photos about themselves, or to organise events.”

Reddit, founded in 2005, allows users to post and reply to those posts on “subreddits” dedicated to almost any topic imaginable. Users have the option to upvote or downvote posts and can send each other direct messages. While Reddit users can use their real names, most of them operate anonymously.

The company went public in 2024 with a valuation of $6.4 billion.

Reddit elaborated on its argument in a statement addressed to its users, which was shared on the platform last week.

“This law is applied to Reddit inaccurately, since we’re a forum primarily for adults and we don’t have the traditional social media features the government has taken issue with,” the company said in the statement.

Australia’s new law, which would place the onus on social media platforms to verify users’ ages, has drawn criticism from other companies it targets as well, such as TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.

Reddit, which says it is complying with the law, told its users that doing so could have unintended consequences.

“This law has the unfortunate effect of forcing intrusive and potentially insecure verification processes on adults as well as minors, isolating teens from the ability to engage in age-appropriate community experiences (including political discussions), and creating an illogical patchwork of which platforms are included and which aren’t,” the company said.

Australia isn’t the only country considering restricting social media use among young people.

Malaysia plans to ban children under 16 from having social media accounts in 2026. In Norway and Denmark, lawmakers have proposed laws that would ban social media accounts for children under 15.

A handful of US senators earlier this year introduced the Kids Off Social Media Act, which would bar social media platforms from allowing children under 13 years old to create or maintain accounts. The act would also bar platforms from using algorithms to target children under 17.

“Australia is stepping up to protect kids from the addictive and harmful content being constantly fed to them on social media. It’s now time for Congress to do the same and pass the Kids Off Social Media Act,” Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, a Democrat, said in a statement to Business Insider.




Source link