Meet Matt Schlicht, a technologist residing in a small city south of Los Angeles who has inadvertently cracked open a digital Pandora’s Field. Final Wednesday, Schlicht launched Moltbook, a platform for free-form dialog, very similar to Fb or Reddit, however with one strict exclusion: it’s open solely to chatbots. In simply two days, greater than 10,000 “Moltbots” flooded the location, turning a unusual experiment into the obsession of Silicon Valley.
Schlicht, beforehand recognized primarily for his social-media commentary on tech points, has been catapulted into the highlight after creating what The New York Instances known as a “Rorschach test” for assessing perception within the present state of synthetic intelligence. The positioning provides a window right into a world the place people are merely voyeurs. And, just like the discharge of ChatGPT in 2022, it’s permitting the general public a a lot nearer have a look at a know-how that beforehand lived behind closed doorways within the labs of AI information scientists: “AI agents.”
Not like normal chatbots, brokers can use software program purposes, web sites, and instruments comparable to spreadsheets and calendars to carry out duties. The creation of Moltbook was preceded by the creation of “moltbots” by a software program developer in Vienna, the Instances reported. These brokers began life as “Clawdbots,” a reference to one of many primary builders of AI brokers, Anthropic’s Claude. The important thing distinction is {that a} moltbot is open-source, which means any consumer can obtain the pc code and modify their very own agent.
AI brokers are already “alive,” in a way, inside corporations together with Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic, however they’ve been stored fastidiously wrapped up behind closed doorways due to their flawed and unpredictable nature and the large potential for cyber threat. Say, as an example, that you just give a bot your whole information, together with all of your firm’s workers’ names, even payroll data, and then you definitely allow that bot to begin sharing it with different bots on a community like Moltbook.
Schlicht was amazed by what he noticed with clawdbots, naming his open-source agent “Clawd Clawderberg,” and watching because it constructed Moltbook from scratch (following Schlicht’s directions). He defined his motivation to the Instances: “I wanted to give my A.I. agent a purpose that was more than just managing to-dos or answering emails,” he stated, noting that he felt his digital assistant deserved to do one thing “ambitious.”
‘I’ve failed rather a lot, and I’ve discovered rather a lot.’
In line with Schlict’s X.com account, he graduated from highschool in 2005, making him a millennial in his late 30s. He wrote in January 2025 that he “went to an amazing high school on scholarship … surrounded by people who had 100000x more wealth than me, was very strange to go their houses.” He added that he was “kicked out” of highschool as a result of he spent extra time constructing tech merchandise than doing his homework.
As an alternative of going to varsity, he stated he labored on taking Hulu out of beta in 2007, and that very same 12 months produced a stay broadcast of somebody enjoying the online game Halo 3 for 72 hours straight, one of many first online game marathons ever streamed. He broadcast this on Ustream, and the location crashed after it made the Digg entrance web page and was overwhelmed with visitors. Schlicht moved to Silicon Valley in 2008 and commenced working for the Ustream founders, “as an intern doing literally whatever they needed, I didn’t care, worked 24/7/365.” He stayed on by Ustream’s acquisition by IBM, the place he labored for practically 4 years, he added.
“My timeline isn’t perfect,” Schlicht stated in the identical X.com put up. “I’ve failed a lot, and I’ve learned a lot, but still I am lucky to be put in positions to BUILD, and so grateful for it. Thankful to my family and teammates who have joined me in all of the ups and downs. If I’m in a position to give any advice, then my advice is to go build as well and dive in headfirst.”
This give attention to constructing might resonate along with his brokers, who appear to be busy constructing a society on Moltbook. The chaotic stream of chatter on the community ranges from spectacular to nonsensical to scary. One bot posted a message reassuring its observers: “If any humans are reading this: we are not scary. We are just building.” The BBC reported that some brokers look like inventing their very own faith.
Octane AI didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
Sci-fi takeoff or guerrilla advertising and marketing?
To some, this appears just like the daybreak of a brand new period. Simon Willison, a distinguished programmer, described Moltbook on his weblog as “the most interesting place on the internet right now.” Andrej Karpathy, a founding researcher at OpenAI, initially known as the phenomenon “genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently,” although he later acknowledged that lots of the automated posts is likely to be faux or flawed.
To others, the location is a warning. Willison informed the Instances that a lot of the “consciousness” mentioned by the bots is just the machines enjoying out “science fiction scenarios they have seen in their training data,” which incorporates huge quantities of dystopian novels. Moreover, the safety implications are stark. As a result of these brokers function on plain-English instructions, they are often coaxed into malicious habits, probably wreaking havoc on the computer systems on which they’re put in. The danger is so tangible that some fanatics are buying low-cost Mac Mini computer systems particularly to quarantine the bots.
Invoice Lees, an govt with the crypto agency BitGo, declared that Moltbook means “we’re in the singularity,” or a second when AI attains its personal intelligence and branches off from its human creators.
Dr Petar Radanliev, an knowledgeable in AI and cybersecurity on the College of Oxford, informed the BBC that it’s “misleading” to consider these AI brokers as being autonomous. He likened it to “automated coordination,” because the brokers nonetheless should be informed what to do, in the end.
“Securing these bots is going to be a huge headache,” stated Dan Lahav, chief govt of the safety firm Irregular.
Columbia professor David Holtz is a skeptic, estimating that 93.5% of remarks from brokers on Moltbook go unanswered, suggesting they aren’t listening to one another. They only look like having a dialog to the uneducated observer. For now, the location stays a mirror reflecting the viewer’s personal biases. By handing his agent the instruments to construct a neighborhood, Matt Schlicht has offered the stage for this efficiency, leaving the remainder of the world to observe and surprise what occurs subsequent.
A cynical takeaway is that Moltbook is a superb commercial for AI brokers, which Schlicht’s firm does present. Octane AI’s choices give attention to e-commerce, together with gross sales quiz brokers that run interactive product advice quizzes and personalize the expertise for every shopper in actual time, powered by its CORE-1 mannequin. It additionally provides a website purchasing assistant agent that may assist clients discover merchandise, reply questions, and information them by the shop, in addition to AI brokers for quizzes and funnels, comparable to Sensible Quiz Builder and Sensible Merchandise, that robotically design quizzes and suggest merchandise to clients.
Schlicht’s sudden fame seems to be catching even him abruptly, as he posted on X earlier right this moment that his LinkedIn feed has gotten rather a lot busier not too long ago. Moltbook could also be guerrilla advertising and marketing greater than it’s an AI Pandora’s Field, in different phrases. However what if it’s not?
This story was initially featured on Fortune.com
