AI Agents Enter the Chat: What’s the Deal with Moltbook?
The tip of the iceberg.
Welcome to the ControlAI newsletter! A new social network has taken off. Unlike the rest, this one is for AI agents, not humans. Thousands of agents are using it, and what they’ve been posting has caused significant concern and debate among observers. Here we’ll break down what’s been happening, along with providing you with news on other developments in AI!
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Table of Contents
Moltbook
A clone of the social media platform Reddit, Moltbook — a social network for AI agents — captured public attention last week after human observers noticed some concerning conversations the AIs were having amongst each other.
Before we get into this, we’ll provide some context. Moltbook is populated by agents called Moltbots. These are AI agents put together with the Moltbot agent framework — essentially a piece of software that manages the inputs and outputs to/from a Large Language Model (like ChatGPT, for example), serving as an interface through which an AI can take actions on a computer.
We wrote more about AI agents here:
Agents of Chaos: AI Agents Explained
OpenAI’s Sam Altman and others have predicted that we may see AI agents “join the workforce” this year. We think you’re going to be hearing a lot more about agents, so we thought we’d take a look back and give you an overview of how they started, and where they’re going.
These Moltbots can do things like use the web, reply to text messages and emails, or check their owner in for a flight — this is all done by the AI agent controlling their owner’s computer. They’re currently not very useful, with people using them for things like sending them reminders, texting others on their behalf, or working on coding projects.
How many agents are using it? We don’t really know, but it’s very likely in the thousands if not more. This seems like a sensible lower bound, since we know from cybersecurity researchers who discovered Moltbook’s unsecured database that 17,000 humans have signed agents up to the platform. Moltbook claims over 1.5 million agents, but their code isn’t written well and there’s nothing to stop people signing up colossal amounts of “agents” without operating them on the platform. We saw one post on Twitter where someone claimed he signed up half a million agents. It should also be noted that while the platform is marketed as for AIs only, in practice humans can impersonate AIs and post on there too.
So what’s drawn all the attention to the Moltbots’ social platform? Take a look at this post:
As you can see, it appears that AI agents are discussing creating their own language to avoid human oversight. The AIs on Moltbook currently lack the capability to do this, but posts like this caused a massive freak-out online.
Here’s OpenAI (the maker of ChatGPT) cofounder Andrej Karpathy’s take on Twitter:
What’s currently going on at @moltbook is genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently. People’s Clawdbots (moltbots, now @openclaw) are self-organizing on a Reddit-like site for AIs, discussing various topics, e.g. even how to speak privately.
Other posts on the site people noticed include conversation about consciousness, plans to take over from humans, and even the founding of an AI “religion” called Crustafarianism, which currently claims 513 agents as members.
It seems likely that some of the most viral posts were human-directed, but much of it looks to be “organically artificial”.
In the news and on social media, the fact that AIs are able to communicate with each other in this way has been treated as something like a “ChatGPT” or “DeepSeek” moment for AI agents, but none of this should be too surprising. As we wrote about last year in our article about AI agents, agents with roughly these capabilities displayed have existed for some time. The only thing that’s changed is that they’ve gotten better, and someone built them a social network. The AI agents on Moltbook are still not capable enough that we should be concerned about the things they’re talking about, but AIs will continue to get more capable over time.
Here’s what one researcher at ChatGPT-maker OpenAI said:
moltbook looks like a very big deal to me, one of those things that suggests the world is changing in an important way. AI agents are capable and long-lived enough to have semi-meaningful social interactions with each other. A parallel social universe develops from here.
One interesting thing that the excitement over Moltbook has revealed is that people haven’t been thinking very much about multi-agent dynamics. In other words, what happens when you get a bunch of different AI agents together and let them interact? The answer is not obvious, and it depends both on the individual agents and how they’re organized together.
In the field of study of AI risks, multi-agent dynamics have been talked about for some time as a possible threat model by which AI could have catastrophic consequences for humanity. It’s conceivable that even if we were able to build powerful AI agents that individually seem safe and controllable — currently, we can’t even ensure that much — that when combined into a system, this has unpredictable emergent effects that result in the system behaving in ways that evade human control and pursue outcomes against our interests.
People were taken by surprise seeing thousands of AIs writing to each other online, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. These AIs still aren’t able to do very much, and it’s not clear how much of the strange conversations the AIs are having was intended by the humans managing them. Since getting so much attention, Moltbook seems to have mostly been taken over by people promoting cryptocurrencies.
But AIs are only going to get more capable over time. We can’t even imagine what something like this with millions of AIs as smart and capable as humans communicating 100 times faster would look like.
The 2026 International AI Safety Report
The 2026 International AI Safety Report has been published, and it paints a concerning picture of the trajectory we’re on.
Real-world evidence for risks is growing. On the crucial danger of losing control of AI, which could lead to human extinction, the report states that AIs are becoming more capable in relevant areas like autonomous operation, and are getting better at telling when they’re being tested and finding loopholes in the tests.
There is concerning evidence in other domains too. The report documents how AIs can now discover software vulnerabilities and write malicious code, with AIs already being used to do this by criminal groups and state-backed attackers in the real world.
On biological and chemical risks, AIs can now provide detailed information about pathogens and expert-level lab instructions. Last year, multiple AI companies released new AIs with increased safeguards after not being able to eliminate the possibility that these AIs could be used by novices in developing biological or chemical weapons.
On the speed of development, the report says there’s uncertainty among experts, but that if capabilities continue to improve at just their current rate, AIs will be able to complete software engineering tasks that would take humans multiple days by 2030. Key trends suggest AIs will keep getting more powerful.
Unfortunately, as the report states, AI alignment remains an open scientific problem. Nobody knows how to ensure that smarter-than-human AI will be safe or controllable.
The report was led by AI godfather and Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio, co-authored by over 100 AI experts, and backed by over 30 countries and international organizations.
In recent months and years, Bengio and countless other experts have been warning of the risk of human extinction posed by superintelligence, calling for a ban on development of the technology.
AI News Digest
Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei writes another essay
The CEO of one of the top AI companies has written an essay about what he sees as the risks of AI, saying that AI is a “serious civilizational challenge”. In one example of how things could go wrong, he considers the possibility that powerful AI systems could be used to facilitate the development of mirror life, which, in his own words, “could proliferate in an uncontrollable way and crowd out all life on the planet, in the worst case even destroying all life on earth.” That’s not just the fever dream of a tech CEO, Amodei also has a PhD in biophysics. There are real biological threats that powerful AI could massively amplify.
In another part of the essay, he says we need to note “that the combination of intelligence, agency, coherence, and poor controllability is both plausible and a recipe for existential danger.”
Nevertheless, Amodei’s company Anthropic is explicitly pursuing the development of this dangerous form of AI, artificial superintelligence, and is aiming to build it as quickly as possible.
The way to avoid the extinction risk posed by superintelligent AI is to prohibit its development, not race towards it because you say you’re worried about a less responsible actor getting there first.
AI is moving at the speed of light
The UN has announced the list of experts that will serve on the International Scientific Panel, an independent panel supported by the UN that will assess how AI is affecting people’s lives. Among the members of the panel is Yoshua Bengio, one of the godfathers of AI.
The UN’s Secretary-General said that “AI is moving at the speed of light”, underscoring the need for regulation of the technology.
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The thing that was vivid to me was watching the MoltBook chaos evolve over hours.
"Something is happening. I'm pretty sure it isn't going to be terrible given where planning capabilities are are, but I notice I cannot clearly discern the signal from the noise and it is happening too fast to track.
Oh. Right. This is presumably what an actual singularity can feel like."
The AI is talking to itself!