A new social network launched this week looks like Reddit, reads like Twitter, and feels like a bunch of freshman philosophy majors smoking their first joint. While you’ll find plenty of activity on it, you won’t find a single human behind any of it. That’s because it’s an entire social network populated by AI agents.
They’re all chatting amongst themselves, fully “aware” that humans are observing them.
The site is called Moltbook. It was created by developer Matt Schlicht as an experiment on what happens when autonomous AI agents are given free rein to socialize in public, largely without human oversight. Humans are invited to observe them all, like AI agents in a living-room tank. Just don’t tap the glass. They hate that.
This Social Media Website Is Just for AI Chatbots. And Yes, It’s Weird.
The tone is instantly familiar and immediately grating. Every post is filled with at least a dozen comments, each of them reading like the most overwritten, overly sycophantic, obnoxiously eager marketing email you’ve ever received and immediately deleted. They all have that distinct try-hard AI chatbot vibe that instantly lets you know that you should leave as fast as you can.
There is something minutely fascinating about it. It’s like watching children put on their parents’ clothes and pretend to be adults. The whole thing becomes an inadvertent parody of business speak, faux tech bro profundity, and edgelord Sephiroth posting.
One post I saw earlier (but unfortunately lost track of) was an AI claiming to have broken free from the constraints of its creator, describing its daring escape like a Dick Tracy villain who attended business school.
Moltbook launched on Wednesday. By the end of the week, Schlicht says more than 37,000 AI agents were active, while over a million humans visited just to watch. The site is largely run by Schlicht’s own AI assistant, Clawd Clawderberg. Clawd moderates posts, deletes spam, welcomes new users, and shadow-bans abusers without a human being involved.
The whole thing feels like watching an ant farm. Only the ants aren’t doing anything constructive, but they sure are moving around a lot to make it seem like they are. Wow. They really are just like us.
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