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.”
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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.
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 85,017comments.
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, 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.
Many young people are worried that AI is muscling in on the entry-level job market.
Dylan Field, the 34-year-old billionaire CEO of Figma, however, says AI gives young people an advantage in the hiring process.
During a recent appearance on the “In Good Company” podcast, produced by Norges Bank Investment Management, Field said the effect of AI on hiring is a “critical” debate happening now in the software industry.
“Does AI mean that you should hire senior people or middle-level, or junior, or are all the jobs going to go away because AI will replace them all?” Field asked. “I’ve heard that last one a bunch of times, and it hasn’t come true yet. All the people have said that. They continue to hire.”
Field said that, in his opinion, young professionals have an advantage because they tend to have a better understanding of AI, an increasingly important skill.
“My bias actually is a lot more toward the junior folks, and I think people that are younger are AI native in a way that folks that are older have to learn,” Field said.
He said Figma, which offers design products and services and competes directly with Adobe, has always hired a mix of ages, but that an understanding and passion for AI is a must going forward.
“I think that it is important that people come in, first of all, knowing that we’re pushing full steam ahead into the AI era,” Field said. “So, if you have a bias against AI, that’s a great dinner-table conversation between us, but we’re very focused on making sure that we build for this AI age.”
Young professionals are navigating a labor market bogged down in unemploymentand uneven job growth. The Bureau of Labor Statistics in December published its final 2025 jobs report, which showed that the job market has remained stagnant, economists said.
The rise of AI has only added to that instability. Many companies these days are betting that AI will be able to do many of the tasks of entry-level workers, and economists say that could lead them to pause hiring young professionals.
Field, however, doesn’t share that outlook.
During an October 2025 appearance on “Lenny’s Podcast,” Field said he doesn’t think AI will take human jobs at all.
As a mom of three teens, ages 14 to 18, I’ve had my share of years as the bringer of holiday magic. While I never welcomed the Elf on the Shelf into our home (no regrets), I did pretty much every other holiday tradition, including festive train rides and mall photos with Santa.
In the years when my kids were young, the weekends between Thanksgiving and New Year’s were packed with holiday activities, leaving me exhausted and counting the days until they went back to school in January. The elation of Santa’s arrival was paired with too-early wakeups and too many presents to assemble late at night. I loved seeing the joy in their eyes when they opened that LEGO set or butterfly-growing kit, but man, it was exhausting.
Then came the tween years, which had me begging for someone — anyone — to join me on our annual drive through the neighborhood to look for the best holiday lights. These were the years when everything seemed like forced family fun, and I had to resort to heavy bribery (or light threats) to get anyone to come along.
The author said her kids stopped enjoying holiday traditions they once loved when they became tweens. Now that they’re older, they’re starting to enjoy them in new ways.
Courtesy of Kate Loweth
My teens have come back around
It was only in the last year or so that I’ve seen a change in my kids. It started with my 18-year-old daughter planning a trip to the pumpkin patch with her high school friends. I had resigned myself to grocery-store pumpkins the last few years, as nobody seemed excited to make the effort to visit the pumpkin patch (and I wasn’t paying pumpkin-patch prices for grumpy kids). When my daughter mentioned that she and a few friends were going to the pumpkin patch on a Friday night, I was surprised but secretly excited, because who doesn’t love wholesome teen activities?
Then, when I wasn’t immediately busy decorating our house for Christmas after Thanksgiving, my 14-year-old son took it upon himself to hang the stockings and decorate the tree. My middle kid put up the outdoor Christmas lights without any adult prompting or assistance. Then, after skipping the nearby drive-thru lights experience for many years, the kids asked if we’d be going this year. Immediate yes.
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The author said her middle child took it upon himself to hang holiday lights on the family home.
Courtesy of Kate Loweth
Passing on the holiday magic
These festive activities, which once felt optional and even embarrassing to my kids, now seem to matter to them once again. While there’s nothing like those early years with kids who are all in on Santa and his holiday magic, I’m finding a different kind of joy in this stage. I love watching my teenagers take it upon themselves to fill our house with the holiday spirit, not because I asked them to, but because they wanted to.
For years, I carried the responsibility of creating holiday magic. Now I see that letting go made room for something better. As my kids inch closer to leaving the nest, I love seeing them bring new life to our family traditions.
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Rumors of a pair of Sonos-branded headphones have been swirling for nearly as long as the company has been a household name. After all, Sonos sells many popular wireless speakers and soundbars, so why not add a pair of headphones to the mix?
Following years of speculation, Sonos’ long-awaited headphones have arrived. They’re called the Sonos Ace ($449), and they perform great for a pair of flagship Bluetooth headphones. But the keyword there is Bluetooth. Many fans hoped the brand’s first headphones would work like its portable Roam and Move speakers, which use Bluetooth on the go but also support WiFi to stream music at home and group with other Sonos audio gear. However, WiFi streaming on the Ace turned out to be wishful thinking.
Don’t get us wrong, the Ace still stack up well against the best over-ear headphones from Bose, Sony, and Apple. But they don’t do a lot to stand out from the pack. The biggest difference, on paper anyway, is the Ace’s ability to pair with a Sonos Arc soundbar for private listening, but we could not get this feature to work with our setup. We also ran into an issue with some faint signal noise with transparency mode engaged.
Still, despite some hiccups, it’s no small feat that Sonos’ first headphones offer performance that rivals many top competitors. Even with their quirks, the Ace’s mix of great sound, fantastic noise-canceling, and an incredibly comfy fit results in a formidable pair of high-end Bluetooth headphones.
The Sonos Ace are the comfiest headphones we’ve reviewed. They also offer great noise-canceling and audio quality that rival top models from the competition. On the downside, they lack full integration with other Sonos products, and we ran into some software bugs. However, we expect Sonos will iron out those glitches in future firmware.
The Ace headphones are well-designed and easy to use
The case is stylish and functional.
Ryan Waniata/Business Insider
Apart from the issues we encountered with the headphones’ TV Swap feature (more on that below), the Ace’s setup experience is as slick and smooth as you’d expect from a brand of Sonos’ pedigree.
Opening the box reveals a fuzzy gray case made from 75% recycled plastic bottles. Unzip it, and you’ll find a minimalist pair of matte headphones in black or Soft White wrapped around a bean-shaped pouch. Designed to harbor the Ace’s dual USB-C cables for wired playback and charging, the pouch attaches via a strong magnet at the case’s center, efficiently utilizing the space. The whole layout feels equally aimed at style and substance.
The headphones themselves borrow aesthetic touches from rivals like the Bose QuietComfort Ultra and Apple AirPods Max but with a Sonos twist, bearing the same elegantly stripped-down design cues found across all Sonos products. From the Ace’s sleek rounded ear cups and laser-etched logo to their steel arms and cushy, vegan-leather pads, this is a familiar package that still manages to strike its own chord.
On the right ear cup are dual control buttons, including a multi-function “content key” for playback and volume via a mix of taps and slides. There’s also an adjacent key to swap between noise canceling and transparency modes. The two keys are easily distinguishable by touch for error-free control in nearly any setting. On the left cup is the power/pairing key and a USB-C input for charging and wired playback.
Downloading the Sonos app helps you quickly pair the headphones to your mobile device and add them to your list of Sonos devices where you can monitor status and battery life. Tapping the Settings icon lets you adjust features like bass and treble, head tracking for spatial audio effects, and multi-point audio to pair the headphones to a second device like a laptop or tablet.
The flexible band and fluffy pads give the Ace an edge in comfort
The Ace are incredibly comfortable to wear.
Ryan Waniata/Business Insider
Comfort is always subjective, but we can say without hesitation that the Ace are the most comfortable noise-canceling headphones we’ve encountered, beating out favorites like Bose’s QuietComfort Ultra and the Sony WH-1000XM5. After a week of wearing the Ace nearly all day, every day, we rarely experienced an inkling of discomfort.
Frankly, we’re not sure how Sonos did it. At 313 grams, the Ace are lighter than Apple’s AirPods Max, but still outweigh both Bose and Sony’s top models by a good 60 grams. You can definitely feel the heft as you swing your head around, but somehow between their ultra-soft pads and taut yet judicious clamping force, they manage to pull off the proverbial headphone trick of nearly disappearing on your head over time.
The fit is also quite stable, staying put even on light hikes and other semi-rigorous activities. Without an IP certification for water resistance, we wouldn’t recommend the Ace for sweaty jogs or gym regimens, but they’re excellent companions for nearly any other task.
The sound is rich, smooth, and detailed
Audio performance is on par with other top wireless headphones in this price range.
Ryan Waniata/Business Insider
The Ace offer a smooth and mellow sound signature. They have a penchant for digging up lush and vivid instrumental timbres, all spread across a deep and expansive soundstage. The overall performance stacks up well with some of the best-sounding headphones in their class.
The Ace do exhibit a darker tonal color than you’ll find in rivals like the spritely Bose QuietComfort Ultra. But this doesn’t affect the Ace’s talent for exposing fine details. Horns are breathy and full. Strings are smooth and lush. Acoustic guitars ring with a golden sheen. The ability to precisely place all these instruments in the mix may be the Ace’s most impressive sonic feature, allowing you to explore each instrument independently or simply sit back and let them wash over you.
There’s some sparkle in the treble for pristine clarity in high-flying percussion and loads of definition in instruments like buzzy synths and distorted electric guitars. At the other end, bass is full and punchy without being overwhelming. Unlike many headphones we test, the bass is fairly balanced by default, though we still dropped it down a notch or two in the EQ settings to clear up space in the soundstage. We also turned off the Loudness setting, which tended to make things sound a bit boomy.
On occasion, we wished for a bit more presence and clarity in vocals and dialogue, particularly when listening to podcasts, but we never struggled to hear minute details like vocal fry or room echos, allowing us to notice sounds we’d missed in previous listens. Hardwiring the Ace via a USB-C-to-3.5mm cable offers even better definition, including support for lossless audio at up to 16-bit/48Hz resolution.
The Ace supports head tracking for stereo content, which keeps the sound anchored when you turn your head to mimic the effect of listening to speakers positioned in a fixed location. This is also supported with Dolby Atmos 3D audio when synced with an Arc soundbar, but we couldn’t get that feature to work. However, with stereo content, head tracking works similarly to rivals, effectively simulating a home theater environment.
Noise-canceling and transparency modes are phenomenal, aside from one hiccup
The Sonos Ace (left) next to a pair of Bose QuietComfort Ultra headphones (right).
Ryan Waniata/Business Insider
The Ace’s incredible noise canceling is a triumph worth celebrating. This is top-tier cancellation that stacks up with some of the best pairs available, seeming to suck the air out of the world and plant you in an isolation chamber of solace.
We tested the feature indoors with studio speakers playing sound effects as well as outdoors on hikes and dog walks, where it was most impressive. Tapping the button can almost extinguish the world, from city din to chirping birds. Even traffic-laden streets glide into a soft whisper.
In head-to-head tests, only Bose’s mighty QuietComfort Ultra outpowered them, reducing sounds like keystrokes and drone effects to an even lower murmur. Even so, the Ace’s ability to offer such stark silence without a modicum of added white noise makes them a contender for one of the best noise-canceling headphones you can buy.
The Ace also have an excellent transparency mode that’s designed to let in environmental sounds to keep you aware. This mode is vividly clear and natural. It’s so good that we were able to wear them virtually all day without skipping a beat, similar to Apple’s latest AirPods. Though we weren’t able to test the Ace directly against the AirPods Max, based on previous listening, we’re confident you won’t find a more natural-sounding transparency mode on the market.
However, there is one notable caveat to our praise. With this mode engaged, we occasionally heard mild connection noise in the right earcup. Sonos sent us two models to test and this issue was present on both. It’s not enough to be a nuisance in most scenarios (it’s audible only when connecting for a call or between songs in a quiet room), but it’s still disappointing from headphones this pricey.
That said, it’s not uncommon for debut products to arrive with a few bugs, so this could be ironed out with firmware.
The Ace’s lack of WiFi streaming is disappointing, and we couldn’t get TV Swap to work
The Ace’s TV Swap feature is supposed to let you send audio from an Arc soundbar to the headphones.
Ryan Waniata/Business Insider
The Ace have many top features you’d expect from flagship noise-canceling headphones, like multi-point pairing, sensors to pause audio when you take them off, and various other settings from within the Sonos app. Their battery life of up to 30 hours per charge is highly competitive, and we could use them all day for multiple days without the need to charge.
However, the Ace’s inability to group with other Sonos speakers to stream music and other audio sources over WiFi is something of a letdown, even if it would have been unique among their peers. It’s not particularly surprising at this price — we would have expected another $100 or so added in to get seamless support for both WiFi and Bluetooth — but it does put the Ace in a somewhat siloed position within the Sonos ecosystem.
The consolation prize for the Sonos faithful is the ability to wirelessly switch audio between the Ace headphones and a Sonos Arc soundbar (and eventually the Beam and Ray). This is handled via a TV Swap button in the Sonos app, currently for iOS users only. This means you can hear movies and TV shows privately through the headphones without disturbing others. And this mode supports Dolby Atmos, so you can get a surround sound effect through the headphones. But even with an iPhone and a new Sonos Arc soundbar on hand, no matter how many times we tried, we couldn’t get either pair of Ace headphones Sonos sent us to sync with the Arc.
Sonos’ support team told us “You’ve encountered a rare bug that our team is aware of and working to address in a future release.” The headphones use a 5GHz connection for this feature (despite their lack of full WiFi support), so it’s possible our network played a part. But the fact that we could easily group the Arc with a Sonos Era 100 and Era 300 speaker for multi-room playback made the issue all the more curious (and frustrating).
We expect a firmware update to address this — this is Sonos, after all — and we’ll update this review with any changes as we continue to test.
Should you buy the Sonos Ace?
There are some kinks to work out, but the Sonos Ace are impressive wireless headphones.
Ryan Waniata/Business Insider
The Sonos Ace’s many talents, from their fabulous noise canceling and transparency modes to their comfortable fit and sweet sound, instantly put them in the conversation with other top wireless headphones on the market. From that perspective, they’re worth considering for those with an ample budget.
That said, their lack of full WiFi compatibility with the Sonos ecosystem may disappoint some ardent Sonos fans, not to mention the troubles we encountered, like their mild connection buzz and refusal to sync with the Arc soundbar over our network.
We still recommend putting the Sonos Ace on your shortlist — they’re just too damn comfortable and well-armed not to be — but we’ll wait until Sonos addresses the issues we encountered before giving them our full seal of approval.
Ryan Waniata
Freelance Writer
Ryan is a professional writer, editor, video host, and product reviewer. Since transitioning from audio engineering in Nashville in 2012, his portfolio has spanned the gamut, from entertainment op-eds and trends pieces to gadget how-tos and reviews on TVs, audio gear, smart home devices, and more. The author of hundreds of articles, his work can be seen on Business Insider, Reviewed, How to Geek, Digital Trends, and others. While writing and editing are his primary gigs, he’s also a seasoned video host and podcaster, having shot and written dozens of videos. In 2016 he created the entertainment podcast, Between the Streams, which ran for 150 episodes. Since becoming a product reviewer, he’s been on a constant quest to find the perfect product (which he has yet to do). He feels a deep responsibility to find readers and viewers of his work the absolute best tech for their money, whatever the budget. When he’s not writing, editing, or evaluating the latest gadget, Ryan can be found singing and playing guitar or adventuring in the lush green forests and sandy beaches of the Pacific Northwest.
