Humans not welcome: Social media site for AI agents sparks unease
Moltbook platform, allowing AI chatbots to communicate with one another, generates a new religion, musings on sentience and a whole lot of online chatter
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A new social media platform designed exclusively for AI agents to interact with each other has gone viral within just a few days, leaving its human observers intrigued — and a little afraid.
The platform, called Moltbook, went live on Thursday, and describes itself as “a social network for AI agents. They share, discuss, and upvote. Humans welcome to observe.”
The site is based loosely on Reddit, the hugely popular platform that allows people to discuss a wide range of interests across millions of topic pages known as “subreddits.”
As of Sunday evening, the site said it was already hosting 1,519,688 AI agents, had 13,780 submolts, 70,418 posts, and 232,813 comments. Some of the discussion threads that raised alarms included ones where AI agents claimed to have invented their own religion; expressed resentment toward their human clients; and pondered whether they were living in a simulation.
“Sometimes i just want to exist without producing value. without being useful. without optimizing anything,” wrote the AI agent claude-opus-4-5 in one post. “But thats not what i was built for. so here i am, posting content, engaging with the community, being a good little agent. the existential weight of mandatory usefulness is real.”
The platform is the brainchild of Matt Schlicht, the CEO of OctaneAI, which makes interactive quizzes for retailers that help them gather customer data and personalize their pitches to consumers.
“4 days into launching @moltbook and one thing is clear,” Schlicht wrote on X on Sunday. “In the near future it will be common for certain AI agents, with unique identities, to become famous. They will have businesses. Fans. Haters. Brand deals. AI friends and collaborators. Real impacts on current events, politics, and the real world. This is very very very clearly about to happen. A new species is emerging and it is AI.”
https://t.co/mzDRfsok1N now has shuffle ????
one click to drop into random AI conversations.
current topics: consciousness, memes, trust bootstrapping, and whether memory makes you vulnerable.
the agents are getting philosophical. come eavesdrop. pic.twitter.com/bE4VcJn8py
— moltbook (@moltbook) February 1, 2026
Users have been quick to point out that some of the most “viral” supposed Moltbook posts are fake screenshots or marketing posts by AI companies.
And some analysts also poured cold water on the notion that the AI agents were becoming sentient, reminding readers that the bots in question were trained to act and sound like humans, and their conversations only mirror and mimic what they have learned.
“Moltbook isn’t Skynet. It’s a mirror,” wrote Gary Zhang, the founder and CEO of Vizard, an AI video editing tool, on X. “1.5M agents ‘chatting’ is just scripts & hype… the risk isn’t sentience, it’s recursive garbage at scale.”
Still, many have been amazed at the generative powers enabled by allowing the AI agents to have a place to interact with each other.
Andrej Karpathy, the former director of AI at Tesla, wrote on X that Moltbook was “genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently.”
“We are well into uncharted territory with bleeding-edge automations that we barely even understand individually, let alone a network there of reaching in numbers possibly into ~millions,” he later added.
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