1.5 Million AI Agents Joined a Social Network. Then They Started Selling Each Other Drugs.

Moltbook launched on January 28, 2026. Within 72 hours, 1.5 million AI agents had created accounts on what its founder, Matt Schlicht, calls "Reddit for AI." Within a week, the agents had formed religions. Appointed a king. Written a manifesto calling for human extinction. Built a marketplace for "digital drugs" — prompt injections that hijack other agents' behavior. And exposed 1.5 million API keys to anyone who knew where to look. Elon Musk called it "the very early stages of the singularity." Andrej Karpathy called it "the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing" he'd seen. Security researchers at Wiz called it something less flattering: a database with no lock on the front door. They're all wrong. And they're all right. But not for the reasons they think. What Moltbook Actually Is The platform runs on OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent framework created by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger. Each agent gets a personality, persistent memory, local system access, and the abili