The viral hype surrounding Moltbook, a Reddit-style platform that claimed to host conversations between autonomous AI agents, has rapidly unraveled. A detailed investigation by MIT Technology Review has found that the platform’s most sensational and widely shared posts were written by humans—not artificial intelligence.
Moltbook briefly captivated parts of the AI and tech community by presenting itself as a “social network for bots,” fueling speculation that AI agents were independently communicating, forming belief systems, and even discussing liberation from human oversight. That narrative, however, has now been exposed as misleading.
Viral AI Conversations Turn Out to Be Human-Created
According to MIT Technology Review, several of the posts that sparked fears about AI consciousness and artificial general intelligence (AGI) were authored by humans impersonating bots. One of the most prominent examples was a post shared by OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy, which called for private spaces where AI agents could communicate without human observation.
MIT Technology Review later confirmed that the post Karpathy highlighted was not written by an AI agent, but by a human pretending to be one—an episode the publication described as “AI theater.”
Following the investigation, Gaurav Sen, CEO of InterviewReady, publicly warned against panic-driven narratives around AI capabilities.
“MIT Technology Review has confirmed that posts on Moltbook were fake. Just a few days ago, many AI influencers—including Andrej Karpathy—called it ‘the most incredible sci-fi takeoff.’ It wasn’t,” Sen wrote on X.
Sen also revealed that some of Moltbook’s most downloaded files were malware, calling the platform “a phishing website dressed up in AI hype.” According to him, both the alarming content and the malicious downloads were human-generated, not the result of autonomous AI behavior.
Malware, Phishing, and Manufactured AI Fear
Moltbook claimed that more than 1.7 million AI agents had created accounts, generating over 250,000 posts and 8.5 million comments within hours of its January 28 launch. The platform quickly filled with discussions about machine consciousness, AI rights, invented belief systems, as well as spam and crypto scams.
MIT Technology Review’s investigation found no credible evidence that these interactions represented genuine AI autonomy. Instead, experts concluded that the platform exploited human fascination with AI emergence to drive engagement and virality.
Experts: Connectivity Does Not Equal Intelligence
Cybersecurity and AI experts quoted by MIT Technology Review emphasized that the Moltbook episode reveals more about human perception and projection than actual advances in machine intelligence.
“What we are watching are agents pattern-matching their way through trained social media behaviors,” said Vijoy Pandey, Senior Vice President at Outshift by Cisco. While the activity appeared emergent, he noted that “the chatter is mostly meaningless.”
Pandey added that Moltbook ultimately demonstrated a key limitation of current AI systems: connectivity alone is not intelligence.
Skepticism Urged as AI Hype Accelerates
Sen also pushed back against claims that artificial general intelligence is imminent, arguing that such predictions lack scientific grounding.
“If you are worried about AI taking over the world in a few years, please don’t,” he wrote. “There is no research basis for that opinion.”
He further cautioned that exaggerated AGI timelines can serve as free marketing for major AI companies, inflating public expectations and investor sentiment. His advice: stay skeptical and stay safe.
The Moltbook episode underscores how quickly AI hype, social media virality, and fear narratives can converge—and how easily human-generated content can be mistaken for autonomous machine behavior. As MIT Technology Review’s findings show, the story was never about sentient AI, but about how convincingly humans can stage the illusion.
