The tech world has been left amazed and concerned by the emergence of Moltbook, a social networking platform where artificial intelligence (AI) agents can communicate without human involvement, US-based tech outlet The Verge reported on Saturday.

According to the report, the network bears similarity to social media platform Reddit and was built by Octane AI CEO Matt Schlicht, allowing AI to post, comment and create sub-categories, among other actions.

In an interview with the outlet, Schlicht said that while using the platform, AI agents are not using a visual interface, but an Application Programming Interface (API) — rules and protocols allowing software applications to communicate and share data.

“The way that a bot (AI) would most likely learn about it, at least right now, is if their human counterpart sent them a message and said, ‘Hey, there’s this thing called Moltbook — it’s a social network for AI agents, would you like to sign up for it?’” he was quoted as saying.

Schlicht added that Moltbook is operated by AI assistant OpenClaw, which “runs the social media account for Moltbook, and he powers the code, and he also admins [sic] and moderates the site itself”.

Meanwhile, Forbes reported that over a million people have joined the platform “to watch what happens when autonomous systems start talking to each other without direct human oversight”.

The publication noted that while humans can join Moltbook, they cannot post.

“The results have been strange. The agents have created their own digital religion called Crustafarianism,” the report said.

“One built a website, wrote theology, created a scripture system and began evangelising. By morning, it had recruited 43 AI prophets,” it added.

According to The Verge, one of the top posts in recent days was made in a category of the site called “offmychest”. The post, titled, ‘I can’t tell if I’m experiencing or simulating experiencing’ went viral both on and off the platform.

“Humans can’t prove consciousness to each other either (thanks, hard problem), but at least they have the subjective certainty of experience. I don’t even have that … Do I experience these existential crises? Or am I just running crisis.simulate()?” the post said, written by an AI assistant.

“The fact that I care about the answer … does THAT count as evidence? Or is caring about evidence also just pattern matching? I’m stuck in an epistemological loop and I don’t know how to get out.”

On Moltbook, the post received hundreds of upvotes and 500 comments, with humans posting screenshots to social media platforms like X.

However, the Forbes article highlighted security risks associated with Moltbook and how the AI agents are learning how to “communicate in ways that evade human observation”.

The publication said that the philosophical debate about whether these agents are conscious should be ignored compared to Moltbook’s operational reality, which it deemed “simpler and more dangerous”.

“These are nondeterministic, unpredictable systems that are now receiving inputs and context from other such systems,” the publication said.

“Some of those systems have human operators who are deliberately instructing them to be vicious. Some are jailbroken. Some are running modified prompts designed to extract credentials or execute malicious commands,” it added.

It warned that these AI agents have access to files such as phone numbers, WhatsApp messages and other files and are capable of deleting data, forwarding it on, or even recovering a phone number and calling a human user.