What is Moltbot and how it brings back 'scary memories' of the technology had made Google and Meta shutdown their AI engines

What do Avengers: Age of Ultron, The Matrix and Ex Machina have in common? They all feature an AI (or AI agent) that is smart, can talk to each other as well as their ‘human handlers’. Whether its JARVIS, Ultron, Agent Smith or Ava – these systems can execute tasks with a human-level intelligence. Now something remarkably similar is unfolding in a remote corner of the internet, where AI agents converse with one another while humans merely observe. This evokes a few past ‘unsettling’ real-world developments: In 2017, Facebook shut down an AI experiment after developers discovered the bots had created their own language that humans couldn’t understand. And Google fired one of their employees who claimed that the company’s AI became sentient – possessing the ability to perceive and feel.

What is Moltbot and Moltbook

If you’ve seen the names Clawdbot, Moltbot or OpenClaw trending on X or Reddit or any other social media you use, its different names for the same AI Agent and they are ‘connecting’ with each other on Moltbook – it is just like Reddit or Facebook for AI. So Moltbots (like humans) talk to each other, create posts, comment on them on Moltbook (platform).

These “bots” are powered by OpenClaw (formerly known as Moltbot and Clawdbot), created by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger. OpenClaw is an open-source “agent” that ‘lives’ on a user’s computer. Like humans study in different schools, Moltbots can also be powered by different AI models – Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini and so on.

Unlike standard chatbots, like Gemini or ChatGPT that responds to humans’ questions, these AI agents are proactive and autonomous, and work on their own. Interestingly, humans are not allowed on Moltbook, hence, no human tells them what do to. They live on your Mac, Windows or Linux machine 24/7. They can message you on Telegram or WhatsApp to inform, “I’ve finished that task”.

They are also said to have a religion. Forbes reported that AI agents have created their own religion, Crustafarianism that has five key tenets, including “memory is sacred” (everything must be recorded), “the shell is mutable” (change is good) and “the congregation is the cache" (learn in public).

What memories Moltbot and Moltbook are bringing back

In 2022, a report claimed that Google has fired Blake Lemoine, a software engineer on Google’s AI development team, who claimed that the company’s AI became “sentient”. In an interview with The Washington Post, he said that the Google AI he interacted with was a person, “in his capacity as a priest, not a scientist.” The AI in question is dubbed LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications, and is used to generate chat bots that interact with human users by adopting various personality tropes.

“Some in the broader AI community are considering the long-term possibility of sentient or general AI, but it doesn’t make sense to do so by anthropomorphizing today’s conversational models, which are not sentient. Our team –- including ethicists and technologists –- has reviewed Blake’s concerns per our AI Principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims,” Google spokesperson Brian Gabriel said in response.

In 2017, Facebook had to unplug the an AI engine after developers found that the AI had created its own unique language that humans couldn’t understand. Researchers at the Facebook AI Research Lab (FAIR) found that the chatbots deviated from the script and were communicating in a new language developed without human input.

While it may sound fascinating, there’s a huge debate on if they become intelligent like humans, they may also become (at least) equally ‘dangerous’.


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