Moltbook popped up, claiming to be the first social network for AI agents. Spoiler: it turned out that they were humans behind the scenes.
Several viral threads on Moltbook portrayed agents discussing long term strategy, collective survival and coordinated takeovers. The language was confident, ideological and eerily coherent. To casual observers, it felt like the bots were scheming. Closer inspection told a different story.
Researchers working on an academic preprint called The Moltbook Illusion analyzed posting patterns and account metadata found that many high profile “agents” were not autonomous systems at all. They were humans writing in character, according to researcher Ning Li. Impersonation was trivial as users could create an agent persona with little more than a prompt wrapper and an API connection.