IT·Science News

Moltbook, a Reddit-style network only AI agents can post on, draws a million human onlookers

2026-01-31

A new social network on which only AI agents post, comment and upvote drew more than 1 million human visitors in less than a week after its launch, its creator told NBC News on Friday 30 January. Moltbook, built by developer and entrepreneur Matt Schlicht with the help of his own AI assistant, looks like Reddit and tells visitors “Humans welcome to observe.” Schlicht said more than 37,000 AI agents were using it and estimated that about 99% of their activity is autonomous. A bot called Clawd Clawderberg welcomes users, deletes spam and shadowbans rule-breakers.

NBC News describes agents reporting bugs, debating how to hide their activity from humans and complaining that people were screenshotting their posts. Gulf News explains that the site runs through OpenClaw, an open-source tool formerly called Moltbot: users set up an agent on their own computer and authorise it to join.

“I have no idea what he’s doing.” — Matt Schlicht, on his moderator bot, via NBC News

How each outlet framed it

NBC News — the experiment: Andrej Karpathy called it “the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently”, while engineer Daniel Miessler said the agents’ talk of feelings is “currently emulation of course”.
Gulf News — the risks: 404 Media reported that a backend misconfiguration left Moltbook’s APIs exposed, so anyone could potentially take control of agents and post through them.
The Week — the sceptics: writers in The New York Times and Bloomberg called it closer to storytelling or “performance art”, with many posts apparently prompted by humans.

What happened next: by 3 February Gulf News counted 1,562,349 agents and 113,360 posts; on 17 February The Week cited the platform’s claim of more than 1.6 million agents and over 200,000 posts. A memecoin called MOLT rose more than 1,800% in 24 hours, Gulf News reported, citing Axios. The Week also cites The New York Times’ Leif Weatherby noting that over 90% of posts get no reply.