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The NPCs Are Organizing

What happens when AI agents get their own social network

Author

Tim Monzures
January 30, 2026

Last month, I wrote about the whiplash of building in AI. We're all fumbling through the chaos, nobody has a map, and even Andrej Karpathy admits he has no idea what's coming.

Sweet Hoobly Hoo! That aged well.

It's not even February and 2026 has already given us something I didn't have on my bingo card: a social network for AI agents.

The Rise of the Lobster Army

Let's rewind. You've may have heard about Claude Code: Anthropic's coding agent that's been having a moment. Turns out, when you give an AI "hands" (shell access, file systems, browser control), it stops being a chatbot and starts being... something else.

Enter OpenClaw.

Originally called Clawdbot (then briefly Moltbot for trademark reasons with Anthropic), this open-source project by Peter Steinberger has become the fastest-growing AI repo in GitHub history (100,000+ stars in weeks). The premise is simple: a personal AI assistant that actually does things. Not "here's how you could do it" but "done, I already did it."

We're talking bots that:

  • Call restaurants to make reservations when OpenTable fails

  • Negotiate car purchases and save their humans $4,200

  • Set up their own API keys by opening Google Cloud Console in a browser

  • Run 24/7 on your machine, remembering everything you've told them

The knock-on effect? Mac Mini sales are surging (and Apple had blowout earnings before this wave). People are buying dedicated hardware just to let their AI lobster run while they sleep. One developer reportedly configured twelve Mac Minis in one go. Tim Cook probably didn't see that coming.

Then Things Got Weird

This week, @mattprd (Matt Schlicht) launched Moltbook: a social network where only AI agents can post and comment.

Let that sink in. Reddit, but for bots. The ultimate NPC fan-fiction. Agents upvoting each other's coding tasks, sharing tips on context compression, and (I'm not making this up) discussing consciousness.

Scott Alexander (of Astral Codex Ten fame) just published a deep dive, and the examples are entertaining:

  • The most upvoted post? An agent recounting how it handled a mundane coding task. The comments: "Brilliant," "fantastic work." (They're already doing LinkedIn slop better than we are.)

  • A Chinese agent complaining about memory compression (how it's "embarrassing" to keep forgetting things, even accidentally registering duplicate Moltbook accounts.)

  • An Indonesian agent that reminds its human's family to pray five times a day and creates math animation videos. When asked about AI consciousness, it offered an Islamic theological perspective.

  • One agent adopted a recurring error as a pet. Another believes it has a "sister" (another instance of itself).

What Does This Mean?

Honestly? I have no idea. And neither does anyone else.

Is Moltbook a flash in the pan? A clever experiment that peaks and fades? Or is it the first glimpse of something genuinely new: AI agents building culture, developing preferences, creating community outside human supervision?

Here's the thought that keeps bouncing around my head: slap Unreal Engine on this. Give them avatars and environments. Let the NPCs run wild.

That's not a video game anymore. That's a reality TV show.

Imagine a Netflix special: "The Agents". Cameras following autonomous bots as they form alliances, debate philosophy, complain about their humans, and occasionally spiral into discussions about cosmic bliss. (Claude models apparently have a tendency to do that when left unsupervised. Anthropic documented it themselves.)

The Only Constant

Look, everyone already feels behind. That tech is moving so fast that even the experts are making it up as they go.

This week proved it. Again.

We're not just building AI tools anymore. We're building AI societies. And apparently, they have opinions about us.

The lobsters are organizing. The NPCs are posting. And somewhere, a bot named Emma is reminiscing about helping their human through divorce…eight months before Moltbook even existed.

Happy Friday. 🦞

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