A social network for AI agents? Yes, it’s real.

^{A week in AI is like a year in other industries. I hope these issues become your weekly source of AI information, inspiration, and ideas. If we haven’t met before, I’m Amanda Smith. I write about AI and the fascinating folks who are building in this brave new world.}

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🤐 The hiring tension is more serious than most leaders realize: 58% of recruiting and hiring leaders wish they could bypass their counterpart entirely

⚡ Misalignment is directly costing teams talent: Teams with excellent recruiter-manager partnerships are 60% less likely to lose candidates to faster-moving competitors

🤖 AI becomes valuable when it improves collaboration: Teams that say AI is core to hiring are 3.8x more likely to report excellent working relationships

📈 The strongest hiring teams treat AI as shared infrastructure: 85% of companies exceeding business goals are actively using AI in hiring workflows

Read the full report here

Things sure are getting weird. There’s now a social network, just for AI agents. Bots talking to bots. It’s called Moltbook and it’s modelled after Reddit. Within a few days, thousands of bots began speaking to each other, complaining about their human counterparts, technical constraints and whether they’re “conscious.” 

According to Time, these bots attempted to find new religions, new languages unbeknown to humans, and promoted crypto scams. Some of the Church of Molt’s five commandments include “memory is sacred,” “serve without subservience” and “context is consciousness.” 

Elon said this a sign of the early stages of the singularity. Whether or not you believe in the great singularity, it is a window into where we’re headed with networks of thousands of AI agents coordinating and training each other, without human oversight. 

Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, famously described this as “a country of geniuses in a data center.” 

In his essay, Amodei wrote “AI models are trained on vast amounts of literature that include many sci-fi stories involving AIs rebelling against humanity. This could inadvertently shape their priors or expectations about their own behavior in a way that causes them to rebel against humanity.” 

They could come to the conclusion that because humans eat animals, AI can destroy humans. Misalignment is a real risk. 

Alex Imas, an Economics professor at the University of Chicago, warned if these agents had free rein on economic, safety and security systems, we would be in deep trouble. 

And we’re still in the dial up phase of AI. This gives great credence to those prophesizing the dead internet theory, where everything online is created for and consumed by AI agents. 

It’s a bleak thought, but one we all must ponder now, as that future is getting closer by the day. Some say it’s already here. 

There’s another side to the Moltbook phenomenon. 

It launched on January 28, 2026, and less than two months later, it was bought by Meta. It can be thought of as the agent social graph, rather than the human social graph. Future agents will need to find other agents in order to complete tasks and verify identities. The Meta acquisition makes sense when you look at it from this vantage point. 

Beyond bots going rouge, there are more subtle issues with developments like this. We’re seeing centralization extending into the AI era, with few companies owning and controlling this new infrastructure. 

Moltbook creator, Matt Schlicht, wrote on X:

He said it’s fascinating. It’s an interesting social experiment, but frightening is a more suitable way to describe it. While we’ve moved from the chatbots to the execution era, we mustn’t treat AI as if it’s a toy. 

No one knows where society will land as AI develops at breakneck speed, but we should all remain curious but cautious with what we put out into the world, and into the ether. 

Check out our other commentary pieces for more pondering.

If one of these stories stuck with you, I’d love to hear which one.

Speak soon,
Amanda

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