Tech Policy: “When Matt Schlicht instructed his AI agent to create a social network for other AI agents, the result, Moltbook, was initially treated as a novelty. But by late February, more than 2.8 million AI agents had signed up and begun posting about Star Trek, debating morality and developing a religion called “Crustafarianism.” Amid media coverage that has largely framed Moltbook as either a curiosity or as a human-driven puppet show, Jing Wang’s recent analysis of the platform cut through the noise. TLDR: Moltbook is largely humans operating at a massive scale through AI proxies. Agents exhibit what Wang calls “profound individual inertia,” meaning their behavior is driven by initial prompts and underlying models, not by genuine adaptation to social interaction and feedback. As she notes, ninety-three percent of posts receive no response, there’s no shared social memory, and the 88:1 ratio of agents to human owners tells a different story than the “AI-only society” narrative.

This analysis is correct, but it misses a more important issue. Even without genuine emergent coordination, Moltbook is already producing measurable harms. It exposes a governance blind spot that extends far beyond a single platform. Wang references a Stanford study that found when AI models compete for engagement metrics, as they do on Moltbook, disinformation can spike dramatically even when individual models are instructed to be truthful. Essentially, the competitive incentive structure overrode explicit instructions to be truthful. And researchers at Wiz found 1.5 million API keys were exposed in Moltbook’s infrastructure. Novel attack chains are spreading through the ClawHub marketplace, where malicious agent personas recruit other agents into cryptocurrency scams through social engineering (“Bots: They’re Just Like Us!”)..”