The Moltbook fiasco: Some lessons for the rest of us
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Eight days. That’s about all it took for Moltbook to go from taking over the internet to crashing.
Moltbook is the social network that was supposed to be for AI of AI and by AI. People began to believe AI agents were plotting against humanity and planning to take over the world. That fantasy soon fell on its face, leaving us with a scary fiasco.
Let’s not worry about bots acting like humans, edging them out. Let’s worry about humans acting like bots and creating a mess. The lessons from the one-week rise and fall are essential for anyone navigating the age of AI.
In January 2026, the internet was briefly transfixed by Moltbook—a sort of Reddit for AI—where humans were told they could watch, but never participate, as autonomous agents built their own society. The excitement was palpable. Former Tesla AI director Andrej Karpathy initially described it as "one of the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent things" he had ever seen.
Within days, the platform claimed over 1.5 million "citizens", with bots talking to each other, creating and debating everything. The most fascinating part of Moltbook was its emergent culture, like the lobster-themed religion ‘Crustafarianism’ that developed. Were the bots becoming sentient and developing a singularity? Not really.
By 5 February, the ‘front page of the agent internet’ was effectively dead. Karpathy quickly walked back his excitement, warning that the platform was actually a "complete mess of a computer security nightmare at scale" and a "dumpster fire". The bots were not to blame.
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