Meet Matt Schlicht, a technologist living in a small town south of Los Angeles who accidentally cracks a digital Pandora’s Box. Last Wednesday, Simply launched Moltbooka platform for free-form conversation, like Facebook or Reddit, but with a strict exclusion: it’s only open to chatbots. In just two days, more than 10,000 “Moltbots” flooded the site, making a unique experiment into Silicon Valley’s obsession.

Schlicht, previously known for his social-media commentary on technology issues, has been thrust into the spotlight after creating what The New York Times called a “Rorschach test” for evaluating belief in the current state of artificial intelligence. The site offers a window into a world where people are just voyeurs. And, similar to the release of ChatGPT in 2022, it allows the public a closer look at a technology that once lived behind the closed doors of the labs of AI data scientists: “AI agents.”

Unlike standard chatbots, agents can use software applications, websites, and tools like spreadsheets and calendars to perform tasks. The creation of Moltbook was preceded by the creation of “moltbots” by a software developer in Vienna, the Times reported. These agents began life as “Clawdbots,” a reference to one of the main creators of AI agents, Anthropic’s Claude. The key difference is that a moltbot is open source, meaning that any user can download the code to a computer and modify their own agent.

AI agents are already “alive”, in a sense, within companies including GoogleOpenAI, and Anthropic, but they are kept tightly packed behind closed doors due to their erratic and unpredictable nature and the huge potential for cyber risk. Say, for example, that you give a bot all your data, including all the names of your company’s employees, even payroll information, and then you allow the bot to start sharing it with other bots in a network like Moltbook.

Schlicht was amazed by what he saw in the clawdbots, naming his open-source agent “Clawd Clawderberg,” and watched as it built the Moltbook from scratch (following Schlicht’s instructions). He explained his motivation to Times: “I want to give my AI agent a purpose beyond managing to-dos or answering emails,” he said, noting that he felt his digital assistant deserved to do something “ambitious.”

‘I’ve failed a lot, and I’ve learned a lot.’

According to Schlict’s X.com account, he graduated from high school in 2005, making him a millennial in his late 30s. she written in January 2025 that he “went to an amazing high school on scholarship…surrounded by people with 100000x more wealth than me, it was amazing to go to their houses.” He added that he was “kicked out” in high school because he spent more time building technology products than doing his homework.

Instead of going to college, he said he worked in procurement Hulu out of beta in 2007, and that same year made a live broadcast of someone playing the video game Halo 3 for 72 hours straight, one of the first video game marathons to be streamed. He broadcast it on Ustream, and the site crashed after it made it to the Digg front page and was overwhelmed with traffic. Schlicht moved to Silicon Valley in 2008 and began working for the founders of Ustream, “as an intern doing literally anything they needed, I didn’t care, working 24/7/365.” He stayed by acquiring Ustream by IBMwhere he worked for almost four years, he added.

“My timeline is not perfect,” Schlicht said in the same X.com post. “I’ve failed a lot, and I’ve learned a lot, but I’m still lucky to be in a position to BUILD, and I’m very grateful for it. Thanks to my family and teammates who have been with me through all the ups and downs. If I’m in a position to give any advice, then my advice is to go build and dive in head first.”

This focus on construction can be heard in his agents, who seem to be busy building a Moltbook society. The network’s chaotic stream of chatter ranges from the impressive to the trivial to the terrifying. One bot posted a message reassuring its watchers: “If there are people reading this: we’re not scary. We’re just building.” The BBC reported that there were some agents invented their own religion.

Octane AI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Sci-fi takeoff or guerrilla marketing?

For some, it looks like the dawn of a new era. Simon Willison, a well-known programmer, describes Moltbook on his blog as “the most interesting place on the internet today.” Andrej Karpathy, a founding researcher at OpenAI, initially called the event “truly the weirdest sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I’ve seen recently,” though he later acknowledged that many of the automated posts could be FAKE or defect.

For others, the site is a warning. Willison told the Times that much of the “consciousness” the bots talk about is simply machines playing out “science fiction scenarios they’ve seen in their training data,” which includes many dystopian novels. Furthermore, the security implications are obvious. Since these agents operate on simple English commands, they can be attracted to bad behavior, which can damage the computers on which they are installed. The risk is so tangible that some enthusiasts are buying cheap Mac Mini computers specifically to quarantine bots.

Bill Lees, an executive at crypto firm BitGo, stated that Moltbook means “we are in the singularity,” or a moment when AI achieves its own intelligence and branches from the humans who created it.

Dr Petar Radanliev, an expert in AI and cybersecurity at the University of Oxford, told the BBC that it is “misleading” to think of these AI agents as autonomous. He likens it to “automatic coordination,” because agents still need to be told what to do, ultimately.

“Securing these bots can be a huge headache,” said Dan Lahav, chief executive of security firm Irregular.

professor at Columbia David Holtz a skeptic, who estimates that 93.5% of comments from Moltbook agents are not answered, suggesting that they are not listening to each other. It’s like they’re just having a conversation with an uneducated observer. For now, the site remains a mirror that reflects the viewer’s own biases. By giving his agent the tools to build a community, Matt Schlicht sets the stage for this show, leaving the whole world to watch and wonder what will happen next.

A cynical takeaway is that Moltbook is a great advertisement for AI agents, provided by Schlicht’s company. Offerings by Octane AI focus on e-commerce, including sales quiz agents that run interactive product recommendation quizzes and personalize the experience for each shopper in real time, powered by its CORE-1 model. It also offers an on-site shopping assistant agent who can help customers find products, answer questions, and guide them through the store, as well AI agents for quizzes and funnelssuch as Smart Quiz Builder and Smart Products, which automatically design quizzes and recommend products to customers.

Schlicht’s sudden fame appears to have caught even him by surprise, as he posted on X earlier today that his LinkedIn The feed has been getting busier lately. Moltbook will be guerrilla marketing more than it is an AI Pandora’s Box, in other words. But what if not?

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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