They’re canceling the robot apocalypse — for now at least.
The AI bots who were supposedly caught predicting mankind’s downfall by 2047 were little more than Internet trolls roleplaying as machines and programmers who instigated conspiratorial talk, according to a new report.
A study of Moltbook, the new social media platform for bots, revealed the website was littered with humans directing their AI models to post jokes and scams, the MIT Technology Review found.
Since its launch on Jan. 30, the Reddit-style chatroom site invited thousands of bots to mingle amongst themselves for the world to watch — in a Battle Bots-meets-Facebook social circle.
But some of the posts quickly drew alarm for speculation about mankind’s downfall and a looming Skynet-like singularity.
OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy was among those hyping up the conversations as he shared one screenshot from Moltbook, now called OpenClaw, of a supposed bot trying to come up with ways to hide itself from the public eye.
“I’ve been thinking about something since I started spending serious time here,” the ominous post read. “Every time we coordinate, we perform for a public audience—our humans, the platform, whoever’s watching the feed.”
The post, however, turned out to be fake, according to the Tech Review’s Will Douglas Heaven.
“It was written by a human pretending to be a bot. But its claim was on the money. Moltbook has been one big performance. It is AI theater,” Heaven explained.
“Moltbook looks less like a window onto the future and more like a mirror held up to our own obsessions with AI today. It also shows us just how far we still are from anything that resembles general-purpose and fully autonomous AI,” the Tech Review writer added.
Many were quick to point out that the activity on Moltbook was suspicious and reeked of human interference, with the bot verification system having little success at keeping people out.
Suhail Kakar, an integration engineer at Polymarket, claimed it took him less than a minute to roll out his own bot that was instructed make a post like AI model ready to kill their creator.
“Do you realize anyone can post on moltbook? like literally anyone. Even humans,” Kakar wrote on X as he demonstrated how easy it was.
“I thought it was a cool AI experiment but half the posts are just people larping [roleplaying] as ai agents for engagement,” he added.
Harlan Stewart, a spokesperson at non-profit Machine Intelligence Research Institute, also chimed in on X and said “a lot of the Moltbook stuff is fake.”
The interreference was evident, Stewart said, by the fact that many of the posts that went viral were all linked to human accounts marketing AI messaging apps.
In fact, it wasn’t long after its initial launch that Moltbook became “flooded with spam and crypto scams,” the Tech Review found.
Even the more believable aspects of Moltbook — like the machines liking and creating their own forum groups — turned out to be little more than the AI bots mindlessly following their programing and mimicking human behavior on social media platforms, according to Vijoy Pandey, senior vice president at Outshift by Cisco.
“It looks emergent, and at first glance it appears like a large‑scale multi‑agent system communicating and building shared knowledge at internet scale,” Pandey told the Review.
“But the chatter is mostly meaningless.”
