In Moltbook hysteria, former top Facebook researcher sees echoes of 2017 panic over bots building a ‘secret language’

This past week, news that AI agents were self-organizing on a social media platform called Moltbook brought forth breathless headlines about the coming robot rebellion. “A social network for AI threatens a ‘total purge’ of humanity,” cried one normally sober science website. Elon Musk declared we were witnessing “the very early stages of the singularity.”

Moltbook—which functions a lot like Reddit but restricts posting to AI bots, while humans are only allowed to observe—generated particular...