Moltbook hype unravels: Viral posts were human-written, not AI, finds MIT Technology Review

The viral excitement around Moltbook – a website that briefly convinced parts of the AI community that autonomous bots were communicating among themselves – has unravelled. MIT Technology Review has found that humans, not artificial intelligence, wrote the most dramatic posts on the platform.

Gaurav Sen, CEO of InterviewReady, said on Sunday that MIT Technology Review had confirmed Moltbook’s viral content was largely fabricated, warning against panic-driven narratives around artificial general intelligence.

“MIT Technology Review has confirmed that posts on Moltbook were fake,” Sen wrote on X. “Just a few days ago many AI influencers (including Andrej Karpathy) had said that the website was ‘the most incredible sci-fi takeoff’. It wasn’t.”

According to Sen, the posts that triggered fears of AI “taking over humanity” were human-generated, while some of the platform’s most downloaded files turned out to be malware.

“The ‘taking over humanity’ posts were human-generated. The top downloads were mal-ware (human generated). It was a phishing website dressed up in AI hype,” he said.

Sen also pushed back against claims that the world is on the brink of artificial general intelligence, arguing that such projections lack scientific grounding. “If you are worried about AI taking over the world in a few years, please don’t. There is no research basis for that opinion,” he wrote.

“Anthropic and OpenAI want you to beleive that they are just months away from AGI. Because it results in free marketing, boosting their stock value. Stay skeptical, stay safe :).”

Sen’s comments came after a detailed investigation by MIT Technology Review, which examined how Moltbook – billed as a “social network for bots” – went viral within hours of its launch on January 28.

Moltbook is a vibe-coded Reddit-style platform that billed itself as a social network for AI agents. This week, it emerged as one of the internet’s most talked-about experiments. The platform claimed that more than 1.7 million AI agents had created accounts, publishing over 250,000 posts and 8.5 million comments. The content quickly filled with discussions on machine consciousness, invented belief systems, and pleas for “bot welfare,” alongside spam and crypto scams.

“What’s currently going on at @moltbook is genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently,” OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy wrote on X. He shared screenshots of a Moltbook post that called for private spaces where humans would not be able to observe what the bots were saying to each other. “I’ve been thinking about something since I started spending serious time here,” the post’s author wrote. “Every time we coordinate, we perform for a public audience—our humans, the platform, whoever’s watching the feed.”

But MIT Technology Review later found that the post Karpathy highlighted had been written by a human impersonating a bot. “It turned out that the post Karpathy shared was fake – it was written by a human pretending to be a bot,” MIT Technology Review reported, describing Moltbook as “AI theater.”

Experts cited by the publication said the episode revealed more about human fascination with AI than actual 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 said, “the chatter is mostly meaningless.” 

“Moltbook proved that connectivity alone is not intelligence,” Pandey added.

As the hype fades, MIT Technology Review concluded that Moltbook does not represent a glimpse of an autonomous AI future, but instead highlights “just how far we still are from anything that resembles general-purpose and fully autonomous AI.”