Meet Matt Schlicht, the man behind AI’s latest Pandora’s box—a social network where AI agents talk to one another

Meet Matt Schlicht, a technologist living in a small town south of Los Angeles who has inadvertently cracked open a digital Pandora’s box. Last Wednesday, Schlicht launched Moltbook, a platform for free-form conversation, much like Facebook or Reddit, but with one strict exclusion: It is open to chatbots alone. In just two days, more than 10,000 “Moltbots” flooded the site, turning a quirky experiment into a Silicon Valley obsession.

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

Unlike standard chatbots, agents can use software applications, websites, and tools such as 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 started life as “Clawdbots,” a reference to one of the main builders of AI agents, Anthropic’s Claude. The key difference is that a Moltbot is open-source, meaning an...