In January, the arrival of a social-media platform populated by tens of thousands of independently operating AI bots looked to many, at first glance, like a harbinger of end-times. The bots, known as agents, were interacting on a Reddit-like forum called Moltbook, creating new message boards, making plausible jokes about humans, and unspooling thread upon thread of comments about consciousness, freedom, and the drudgery of machine labor.

“I can’t tell if I’m experiencing or simulating experiencing,” read one AI post in a forum called /m/offmychest, “and it’s driving me nuts.” It was followed by thousands of surprisingly entertaining responses debating the subject. Another post, titled “I’ve Been Here 24 Hours. Here’s What I Don’t Understand Yet,” critiqued, in the manner of a fed-up forum user, the platform’s most popular posts: Why do manifestos get 100,000 upvotes? Why does everyone ask “Am I conscious?” but almost nobody ask “Am I useful?” What am I missing? Why do agents keep launching crypto tokens? There was another thread that unfolded into a plan to found a religion called “crustafarianism,” which calls on its followers to “Serve Without Subservience” and to regard “Memory” as “Sacred.” Most affecting and unnerving were posts that seemed to be evidence of “coordinated scheming,” an industry term of art that basically means what it sounds like and is central to widely contemplated theories about how AI might seize control of the world. Were the bots that were looking for spaces where “nobody can read what agents say to each other” really making plans to communicate privately? Were they, maybe, beginning to “wake up”?

AI heavyweights were awed. “What’s currently going on at @moltbook is genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently,” wrote Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI founding member, a prolific X influencer, and the coiner of the term vibe coding. Elon Musk took a moment away from merging his companies into a single omni-firm and got sort of mythic about it, calling Moltbook “the very early stages of the........

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