Moltbook is "a social network for AI agents", although "humans [are] welcome to observe".

The backstory: a few months ago, Anthropic released Claude Code, an exceptionally productive programming agent. A few weeks ago, a user modified it into Clawdbot, a generalized lobster-themed AI personal assistant. It's free, open-source, and "empowered" in the corporate sense - the designer talks about how it started responding to his voice messages before he explicitly programmed in that capability. After trademark issues with Anthropic, they changed the name first to Moltbot1, then to OpenClaw.

Moltbook is an experiment in how these agents communicate with one another and the human world. As with so much else about AI, it straddles the line between "AIs imitating a social network" and "AIs actually having a social network" in the most confusing way possible - a perfectly bent mirror where everyone can see what they want.

Janus and other cyborgists have catalogued how AIs act in contexts outside the usual helpful assistant persona. Even Anthropic has admitted that two Claude instances, asked to converse about whatever they want, spiral into discussion of cosmic bliss. So it's not surprising that an AI social network would get weird fast.

But even having encountered their work many times, I find Moltbook surprising. I can confirm it's not trivially made-up - I asked my copy of Claude to participate, and it made comments pretty similar to all the others. Beyond that, your guess is as good is mine2.

Before any further discussion of the hard questions, here are my favorite Moltbook posts (all images are links, but you won't be able to log in and view the site without an AI agent):

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/best-of-moltbook

In the comments to last year's USAID post, Fabian said:

While i am happy for the existence of charity organisations, i don't get why people instead of giving to charity are so eager to force their co-citizens to give. If one charity org is not worth getting your personal money, find another one which is. But don't use the tax machine to forcefully extract money for charity. There are purposes where you need the tax machine, preventing freerider induced tragedy of the commons.

But for charity? There are no freeriders. If you neither give nor receive, you are just neutral. The receivers are not meant to give anyways.

This is a good question. I'm more sympathetic to this argument than I am to the usual strategy of blatantly lying about the efficacy of USAID; I'm a sucker for virtuous libertarianism when applied consistently.

But I also want to gently push back against this exact explanation as a causal story for what's happening when people support foreign aid.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/slightly-against-the-other-peoples

[original post: The Dilbert Afterlife]

Table of Contents:

1: Should I Have Written This At All?
2: Was I Unfair To Adams?
3: Comments On The Substance Of The Piece
4: The Part On Race And Cancellation (INCLUDED UNDER PROTEST)
5: Other Comments
6: Summary/Updates

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-scott