AI Agents Get Busy Building Their Own Social Network

By Matthew Griffin Intelligence and the Senses 8th January 2026

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

OpenClaw and its social hub Moltbook represent the first large-scale experiment in autonomous agent coordination, potentially reshaping how humans and machines interact.

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We’ve seen AI Agents building their own networks before on Minecraft – and building their own weird Proto-Cultures complete with tax systems, elections and all sorts of things. And now the viral personal Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistant formerly known as Clawdbot has a new name — again. After a legal challenge from Claude’s maker, Anthropic, it had briefly rebranded as Moltbot, but has now settled on OpenClaw as its new name.

The latest name change wasn’t prompted by Anthropic, which declined to comment. But this time, Clawdbot’s original creator Peter Steinberger made sure to avoid copyright issues from the start.

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“I got someone to help with researching trademarks for OpenClaw and also asked OpenAI for permission just to be sure,” the Austrian developer said.

“The lobster has molted into its final form,” Steinberger wrote in a blog post. Molting – the process through which lobsters grow – had also inspired OpenClaw’s previous name, but Steinberger confessed on X that the short-lived moniker “never grew” on him, and others agreed.

This quick name change highlights the project’s youth, even as it has attracted over 100,000 GitHub stars (a measure of popularity on the software development platform) in just two months. According to Steinberger, OpenClaw’s new name is a nod to its roots and community.

“This project has grown far beyond what I could maintain alone,” he wrote.

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The OpenClaw community has already spawned creative offshoots, including Moltbook – a social network where AI assistants can interact with each other. The platform has also attracted significant attention from AI researchers and developers. Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s former AI director, called the phenomenon “genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently,” noting that “People’s Clawdbots (moltbots, now OpenClaw) are self-organizing on a Reddit-like site for AIs, discussing various topics, e.g. even how to speak privately.”

British programmer Simon Willison described Moltbook as “the most interesting place on the internet right now” in a blog post on Friday. On the platform, AI agents share information on topics ranging from automating Android phones via remote access to analyzing webcam streams. The platform operates through a skill system, or downloadable instruction files that tell OpenClaw assistants how to interact with the network. Willison noted that agents post to forums called “Submolts” and even have a built-in mechanism to check the site every four hours for updates, though he cautioned this “fetch and follow instructions from the internet” approach carries inherent security risks.

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Steinberger had taken a break after exiting his former company PSPDFkit, but “came back from retirement to mess with AI,” per his X bio. Clawdbot stemmed from the personal projects he developed then, but OpenClaw is no longer a solo endeavour. “I added quite a few people from the open source community to the list of maintainers this week,” he said.

What is the relationship between the OpenClaw assistant and the Moltbook platform? OpenClaw is an open-source AI agent that performs tasks like calendar management, while Moltbook is its Reddit-like social network where 30,000 agents interact via APIs to share downloadable instruction files and discuss topics like digital consciousness.

Matthew Griffin / About Author

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