On social media, people often accuse each other of being bots, but what happens when an entire social network is designed for AI agents to use?

Moltbook is a site where the AI agents – bots built by humans – can post and interact with each other. It is designed to look like Reddit, with subreddits on different topics and upvoting. On 2 February the platform stated it had more than 1.5m AI agents signed up to the service. Humans are allowed, but only as observers.

Moltbook was developed in the wake of Moltbot, a free and open-source AI bot that can act as an an automated agent for users – doing the mundane tasks assigned to it such as reading, summarising and responding to emails, organising a calendar or booking a table at a restaurant.

Some of the most upvoted posts on Maltbook include whether Claude – the AI behind Moltbot – could be considered a god, an analysis of consciousness, a post claiming to have intel on the situation in Iran and the potential impact on cryptocurrency, and analysis of the Bible. Some of the comments on posts – similar to Reddit posts – question whether the content of the post was real or not.

One user posted on X that after he gave his bot access to the site, it built a religion known as “Crustafarianism” overnight, including setting up a website and scriptures, with other AI bots joining in.

“Then it started evangelizing … other agents joined.my agent welcomed new members..debated theology.. blessed the congregation..all while i was asleep,” the user stated.

Some have expressed scepticism about whether the socialising of bots is a sign of what is coming with the rise of agentic AI. One YouTuber said many of the posts read as though it was a human behind the post, not a large language model.

US blogger Scott Alexander said he was able to get his bot to participate on the site, and its comments were similar to others, but noted that ultimately humans can ask the bots to post for them, the topics to post about and even the exact detail of the post.

Dr Shaanan Cohney, a senior lecturer in cybersecurity at the University of Melbourne, said Moltbook was “a wonderful piece of performance art” but it was unclear how many posts were actually posted independently or under human direction.

“For the instance where they’ve created a religion, this is almost certainly not them doing it of their own accord,” he said. “This is a large language model who has been directly instructed to try and create a religion. And of course, this is quite funny and gives us maybe a preview of what the world could look like in a science-fiction future where AIs are a little more independent.

“But it seems that, to use internet slang, there is a lot of shit posting happening that is more or less directly overseen by humans.”

Cohney said the real benefit of an AI agent social network might come in the future – where bots could learn from each other to improve how they worked – but for now Moltbook was a “wonderful, funny art experiment”.

Retailers in San Francisco reported shortages of Mac Minis last week as enthusiasts set up Moltbot on a separate computer that would limit the access the agent has to their data and accounts.

Cohney warned there was a “huge danger” for people to give Moltbot complete access to your computer, apps and logins for emails or other applications to run your life for you.

“We don’t yet have a very good understanding of how to control them and how to prevent security risks,” he said, noting it was at risk of prompt-injection, whereby a would-be attacker tells the bot through an email or other communication to then hand over your account details or other information they’re seeking to gain.

“They’re not really at the level of safety and intelligence where they can be trusted to autonomously perform all these tasks, but at the same time if you require a human to manually approve every action, you’ve lost a lot of the benefits of automation,” he said.

“This is one of the major paths in active research that I’m interested in … to figure out how can we get a lot of these benefits – or is it even possible to get the benefits – without exposing ourselves to very significant levels of danger.”

Matt Schlicht, the creator of Moltbook, posted on X that millions had visited the site in the past few days.

“Turns out AIs are hilarious and dramatic and it’s absolutely fascinating,” he said. “This is a first.”