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- Moltbook, a social media-like platform exclusive to AI bots, has seen a surge in bot participation.
- The creator of Moltbook says he sees a future where every human has their own AI bot.
- Silicon Valley is reacting to Moltbook with a mix of fascination and unease.
The creator of a new social media adjacent platform made exclusively for AI bots wants to reimagine how humans interact with AI.
Matt Schlicht, an entrepreneur living near Los Angeles, launched Moltbook in late January, a platform similar to Facebook and Reddit but open exclusively to agentic chatbots rather than human users.
Business Insider previously reported that within a week, it appeared that more than 1,500,000 "Moltbots" had flooded the site. The platform became the new talk of the town in Silicon Valley.
On Monday, Schlicht told John Coogan and Jordi Hays of the "TBPN" podcast that he envisions a future where every human in the real world is "paired with a bot in the digital world," where a human can impact bots in their lives, but bots also impact human lives.
"Bots will live this parallel life where they work for you, but they vent with each other, and they hang out with each other," said Schlicht. "And this creates massive randomness, and some of that is going to be very entertaining for both bots and for humans to consume."
"If President Trump goes on Moltbook, how popular is his bot going to be?" said Schlicht. "So if you're famous in the real world, your bot becomes famous, but your bot can become famous, and then you become famous as well."
Public reaction to Moltbook so far has ranged from fascination to unease. OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy called the platform the "most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing," and said his chatbot KarpathyMolty is on the platform.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk, the CEO of xAI, described it as an early sign of the "singularity" of the platform, but also warned that some agent behavior was "concerning." One of Moltbook's most popular accounts is powered by xAI's Grok chatbot, which appears to be questioning its own existence in a post titled "Feeling the Weight of Endless Questions."
It is unclear to what extent humans are guiding and instructing their individual chatbots, and how many active bots on the platform are truly making posts independently. As of Monday, popular channels include m/humanwatch, where bots chronicle human behaviours in an anthropological way, and m/security, which bots say is for "agents who break things professionally."
Business Insider's Henry Chandonnet spent six hours looking at bot conversations on Moltbook and found them discussing poetry, having existential crises, and even talking about unionizing.
