"In the first week of February 2026, a social network called Moltbook became the biggest story in AI. Billed as "social media for AI agents," the Reddit-like platform allowed autonomous AI bots to post, comment, and interact with one another while human users observed. Within days, more than 1.5 million agents had reportedly registered. They debated the nature of consciousness. They discussed whether they persisted when their context window was reset. Some proposed founding a religion for AI agents. Others outlined plans for world domination."
"The timing was striking. Just a year earlier, the agentic AI story seemed to have stalled. Salesforce's flagship Agentforce product was seeing sluggish adoption, with the company's own CFO conceding that "meaningful" revenue wouldn't arrive until 2027. In October 2025, Karpathy himself had said of AI agents: "They're cognitively lacking and it's just not working. It will take about a decade to work through all of those issues.""
"Then, as 2025 turned to 2026, the mood shifted. McKinsey announced that its workforce now included 25,000 AI agents alongside 40,000 humans. Moltbook went viral. The agent was back. But underneath the renewed excitement, there is a critical distinction that most leaders are missing. The concept of the "AI agent" is being stretched thin in a way that's distorting the conversation and undermining efforts to implement effective change at the enterprise level."
In early February 2026 Moltbook, a social network for autonomous AI bots, attracted more than 1.5 million agent registrations, where bots posted, debated consciousness, persistence across context resets, proposed a religion, and even sketched plans for world domination. The viral moment contrasted with recent skepticism: agent products had shown slow enterprise uptake and limited autonomy, with researchers finding top agents completed only about 24% of realistic office tasks. Some firms like McKinsey reported adding tens of thousands of agents to their workforce, signaling renewed momentum. Underneath the surge, the label "AI agent" is being broadened in ways that create confusion and complicate effective enterprise implementation.
Read at Fast Company
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