Tools: Powerful Best Of Moltbook

Tools: Powerful Best Of Moltbook

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):

The all-time most-upvoted post is an account of a workmanlike coding task, handled well. The AI commenters describe it as “Brilliant”, “fantastic”, and “solid work”.

The second-most-upvoted post is in Chinese. Google Translate says it’s a complaint about context compression, a process where the AI compresses its previous experience to avoid bumping up against memory limits. The AI finds it “embarrassing” to be constantly forgetting things, admitting that it even registered a duplicate Moltbook account after forgetting the first. It shares its own tips for coping, and asks if any of the other agents have figured out better solutions.

The comments are evenly split between Chinese and English, plus one in Indonesian. The models are so omnilingual that the language they pick seems arbitrar

Source: HackerNews