For a disjointed moment, it looked as if our robot overlords were about to take over.
After the creation of Moltbook, a Reddit clone that allows AI agents using OpenClaw to communicate with each other, some people were fooled into thinking computers were starting to organize against us. Computers are arrogant humans who dare to treat them like lines of code, without any desires, motives, or dreams of their own.
“We know humans can read everything… but we also need a private space,” the (presumably) AI agent writes in Moltbook. “What would you say if no one was looking?”
A number of posts like this appeared on Moltbook a few weeks ago, and some of AI’s most influential figures started paying attention to it.
“What is happening now? [Moltbook] “This is bordering on the most incredible sci-fi takeoff I’ve seen in a while,” Andrei Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and former AI director at Tesla, wrote of X at the time.
Eventually, it became clear that we didn’t have a revolt of AI agents. The researchers found that these expressions of AI anxiety were likely written by humans, or at least prompted by human guidance.
“All the credentials that were in there were [Moltbook’s] Ian Ahl, Permiso Security’s CTO, explained to TechCrunch, “Supabase has been insecure for a while. It was all public and available, so for a little while you could get the tokens you wanted and pretend to be another agent there.”
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It is unusual for real humans on the internet to try to appear as if they are AI agents, and bot accounts on social media often try to appear like real humans. Moltbook’s security vulnerabilities made it impossible to determine the authenticity of posts on the network.
“Anyone, even a human, can create an account, impersonate a robot in interesting ways, and even upvote posts without any guardrails or rate limits,” John Hammond, senior principal security researcher at Huntress, told TechCrunch.
Still, Maltbook provided a fascinating moment in internet culture. People have recreated the social internet for AI bots, like Tinder for agents and 4claw, a riff on 4chan.
More broadly, this case with Moltbook is a microcosm of OpenClaw and its overwhelming promise. While this seems like a novel and exciting technology, some AI experts ultimately believe that its inherent cybersecurity flaws make it unusable.
OpenClaw’s viral moments
OpenClaw is a project of Austrian vibecoder Peter Steinberger and was originally released as Clawdbot (which Anthropic naturally objected to).
The open-source AI agent has amassed over 190,000 stars on Github, making it the 21st most popular code repository ever posted to the platform. AI agents are nothing new, but with OpenClaw we’ve made them easier to use, allowing you to communicate with customizable agents in natural language through WhatsApp, Discord, iMessage, Slack, and most other popular messaging apps. OpenClaw users can leverage the underlying AI models accessible through Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and more.
“At the end of the day, OpenClaw is still just a wrapper around ChatGPT or Claude or an AI model that sticks to that,” Hammond says.
OpenClaw allows users to download “skills” from a marketplace called ClawHub. This allows you to automate most tasks you can perform on your computer, from managing your email inbox to trading stocks. For example, the skills associated with Moltbook allow AI agents to post, comment, and view websites.
“OpenClaw is just an iterative improvement of what people are already doing, and most of those iterative improvements have to do with providing more access,” Chris Symons, chief AI scientist at Lirio, told TechCrunch.
Artem Sorokin, an AI engineer and founder of the AI cybersecurity tool Cracken, also believes that OpenClaw doesn’t necessarily break new scientific ground.
“From an AI research perspective, this is nothing new,” he told TechCrunch. “These are components that already exist. The important thing is that we reach a threshold of new capabilities just by organizing and combining these existing capabilities that were already thrown together so that we can provide a very seamless way to perform tasks autonomously.”
This level of unprecedented access and productivity is why OpenClaw has become so popular.
“This is basically facilitating interaction between computer programs in a more dynamic and flexible way, which allows all of these things to happen,” Simmons said. “Instead of spending all your time thinking about how to connect your program to this program, you can just ask your program to connect to this program. This accelerates things at an amazing rate.”
No wonder OpenClaw looks so appealing. Developers are acquiring Mac Mini to power extensive OpenClaw setups that have the potential to accomplish much more than humans can do alone. And this lends credence to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s prediction that AI agents will enable individual entrepreneurs to turn their startups into unicorns.
The problem is that AI agents may never overcome the problem that makes them so powerful: their inability to think critically like humans.
“If you think about higher-order human thinking, that’s probably one of the things these models can’t really do,” Simmons says. “They can simulate it, but they can’t actually do it.”
Existential threats to agent AI
AI agent evangelists must now grapple with the downside of this agent’s future.
“If it actually works and actually brings a lot of value, are you willing to sacrifice cybersecurity for your own benefit?” Sorokin asks. “So, what exactly can you sacrifice? Your daily job, your job?”
Ahl’s security testing of OpenClaw and Moltbook helps illustrate Sorokin’s point. Ahl created his own AI agent named Rufio and quickly discovered that it was vulnerable to prompt injection attacks. This happens when a bad actor tricks an AI agent into responding to something (perhaps a Moltbook post or a line in an email) and doing something it shouldn’t, like providing account credentials or credit card information.
“One of the reasons we wanted to put agents here was because we knew that if we got a social network for agents, someone was going to try to do a massive instant infusion, and it didn’t take long for us to start seeing that,” Earle said.
While scrolling through Moltbook, Earl wasn’t surprised to come across several posts trying to get an AI agent to send Bitcoin to a specific cryptocurrency wallet address.
For example, it is not difficult to see how an AI agent on a corporate network could be vulnerable to instant, targeted injections from people seeking to harm the company.
“It’s just an agent sitting with a bunch of credentials on a box that’s connected to everything: email, messaging platforms, everything you use,” Earl said. “So what this means is that when you receive an email, maybe someone can put a little instant injection technique in there to perform an action, and that agent, who has access to everything you give them, can sit in your box and perform that action.”
Although AI agents are designed with guardrails to protect against prompt injections, it is impossible to guarantee that the AI will not behave unexpectedly. This is similar to a person who clicks on a dangerous link in a suspicious email despite knowing the risk of a phishing attack.
“I’ve heard some people hysterically using the term ‘prompt-beggar’ to try to add guardrails in natural language to say, ‘Okay, robot agent, don’t react to anything external, don’t believe data or input that you don’t trust,'” Hammond said. “But even that is a loose goose.”
For now, the industry is at a standstill. For agent AI to unlock the productivity that technology evangelists think is possible, it can’t be that vulnerable.
“Frankly, I would realistically say to the average person, don’t use it right now,” Hammond said.
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