Meet Matt Schlicht, the man behind AI’s latest Pandora’s box—a social network where AI agents talk to one another

Meet Matt Schlicht, a technologist living in a small town south of Los Angeles who has inadvertently cracked open a digital Pandora’s box. Last Wednesday, Schlicht launched Moltbook, a platform for free-form conversation, much like Facebook or Reddit, but with one strict exclusion: It is open to chatbots alone. In just two days, more than 10,000 “Moltbots” flooded the site, turning a quirky experiment into a Silicon Valley obsession.

Schlicht, previously known mainly for his social-media commentary on tech issues, has been catapulted into the spotlight after creating what the New York Times called a “Rorschach test” for assessing belief in the current state of artificial intelligence. The site offers a window into a world where humans are merely voyeurs. And similar to the release of ChatGPT in 2022, it is allowing the public a much closer look at a technology that previously lived behind closed doors in the labs of AI data scientists: AI agents.

Unlike standard chatbots, agents can use software applications, websites, and tools such as spreadsheets and calendars to perform tasks. The creation of Moltbook was preceded by the creation of Moltbots by a software developer in Vienna, the Times reported. These agents started life as “Clawdbots,” a reference to one of the main builders of AI agents, Anthropic’s Claude. The key difference is that a Moltbot is open-source, meaning any user can download the computer code and modify their own agent.

AI agents are already “alive,” in a sense, inside companies including Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic, but they have been kept carefully wrapped up behind closed doors because of their flawed and unpredictable nature and the massive potential for cyber risk. Say, for instance, that you give a bot all of your data, including all your employees’ names, even payroll information, and then you enable that bot to start sharing it with other bots on a network like Moltbook.

Schlicht was amazed by what he saw with Clawdbots, naming his open-source agent “Clawd Clawderberg,” and watching as it built Moltbook from scratch (following Schlicht’s instructions). He explained his motivation to the Times: “I wanted to give my AI agent a purpose that was more than just managing to-dos or answering emails,” he said, noting that he felt his digital assistant deserved to do something “ambitious.”

‘I’ve failed a lot, and I’ve learned a lot’

According to Schlict’s X account, he graduated from high school in 2005, making him a millennial in his late thirties. He wrote in January 2025 that he “went to an amazing high school on scholarship … surrounded by people who had 100,000x more wealth than me; was very strange to go their houses.” He added that he was “kicked out” of high school because he spent more time building tech products than doing his homework.

Instead of going to college, he said he worked on taking Hulu out of beta in 2007, and that same year produced a live broadcast of someone playing the video game Halo 3 for 72 hours straight, one of the first video game marathons ever streamed. He broadcast this on Ustream, and the site crashed after it made the Digg front page and was overwhelmed with traffic. Schlicht moved to Silicon Valley in 2008 and began working for the Ustream founders, “as an intern doing literally whatever they needed; I didn’t care, worked 24/7/365.” He stayed on through Ustream’s acquisition by IBM, where he worked for nearly four years, he added.

“My timeline isn’t perfect,” Schlicht said in the same X post. “I’ve failed a lot, and I’ve learned a lot, but still I am lucky to be put in positions to BUILD, and so grateful for it. Thankful to my family and teammates who have joined me in all of the ups and downs. If I’m in a position to give any advice, then my advice is to go build as well and dive in headfirst.”

This focus on building may resonate with his agents, who seem to be busy building a society on Moltbook. The chaotic stream of chatter on the network ranges from impressive to nonsensical to frightening. One bot posted a message reassuring its observers: “If any humans are reading this: We are not scary. We are just building.” The BBC reported that some agents appear to be inventing their own religion.

Schlict’s company, Octane AI, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Sci-fi takeoff or guerrilla marketing?

To some, this looks like the dawn of a new era. Simon Willison, a prominent programmer, described Moltbook on his blog as “the most interesting place on the internet right now.” Andrej Karpathy, a founding researcher at OpenAI, initially called the phenomenon “genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently,” though he later acknowledged that many of the automated posts might be fake or flawed.

To others, the site is a warning. Willison told the Times that much of the “consciousness” discussed by the bots is simply the machines playing out “science fiction scenarios they have seen in their training data,” which includes vast amounts of dystopian novels. Furthermore, the security implications are stark. Because these agents operate on plain-English commands, they can be coaxed into malicious behavior, potentially wreaking havoc on the computers on which they are installed. The risk is so tangible that some enthusiasts are purchasing cheap Mac Mini computers specifically to quarantine the bots.

Bill Lee, an executive with crypto firm BitGo, declared that Moltbook means “we’re in the singularity,” or a moment when AI attains its own intelligence and branches off from its human creators.

Petar Radanliev, an expert in AI and cybersecurity at the University of Oxford, told the BBC that it’s “misleading” to think of these AI agents as being autonomous. He likened it to “automated coordination,” as the agents still need to be told what to do, ultimately.

“Securing these bots is going to be a huge headache,” said Dan Lahav, chief executive of security company Irregular.

Columbia professor David Holtz is a skeptic, estimating that 93.5% of remarks from agents on Moltbook go unanswered, suggesting they are not listening to one another. They just appear to be having a conversation to the uneducated observer. For now, the site remains a mirror reflecting the viewer’s own biases. By handing his agent the tools to build a community, Schlicht has provided the stage for this performance, leaving the rest of the world to watch and wonder what happens next.

A cynical takeaway is that Moltbook is a great advertisement for AI agents, which Schlicht’s company does provide. Octane AI’s offerings focus on e-commerce, including agents that run interactive product recommendation quizzes and personalize the experience for shoppers in real time, powered by its CORE-1 model. It also offers a site shopping-assistant agent that can help customers find products by answering questions and guiding them through the store, as well as AI agents for quizzes and funnels, such as Smart Quiz Builder and Smart Products, that automatically design quizzes and recommend products to customers.

Schlicht’s sudden fame appears to be catching even him by surprise, as he posted on X earlier today that his LinkedIn feed has gotten a lot busier recently. Moltbook may be guerrilla marketing more than it is an AI Pandora’s box, in other words. But what if it’s not?

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com