WIRED spoke with the Zoomer founders of a platform where AI agents hire humans to do real-world tasks. Their pitch: People would love to have a clanker as their boss. For centuries, people have catastrophized about robots taking away jobs. On February 1, the paradigm shifted: bots are jobs. Now, 518,284 humans--and rapidly counting--are offering their labor to AI agents on a new online marketplace called RentAHuman . There are classifieds to count pigeons in Washington ($30/hour); deliver CBD gummies ($75/hour); play exhibition badminton ($100/hour); and anything else you could possibly imagine that a disembodied agent couldn't do.

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. A delivery robot battles the elements in West Hollywood, gets support from online fans: 'Go coco, go!' Coco Robotics describes its delivery bots, pictured in 2023, as being "weather proof" and "engineered for efficient city travel." That description was put to the test during this latest storm. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here .

From small publishers to US federal agencies, websites are reporting unusual spikes in automated traffic linked to IP addresses in Lanzhou, China. For a brief moment in October, Alejandro Quintero thought he had made it big in China . The Bogotá-based data analyst owns and manages a website that publishes articles about paranormal activities, like ghosts and aliens. The content is written in "Spanglish," he says, and was never intended for an Asian audience. But last fall, Quintero's site suddenly began receiving a large volume of visits from China and Singapore.

The viral social network for bots reveals as much about our own current mania for AI as it does about the future of agents. For a few days this week the hottest new hangout on the internet was a vibe-coded Reddit clone called Moltbook, which billed itself as a social network for bots. As the website's tagline puts it: "Where AI agents share, discuss, and upvote. Launched on January 28 by Matt Schlicht, a US tech entrepreneur, Moltbook went viral in a matter of hours. Schlicht's idea was to make a place where instances of a free open-source LLM-powered agent known as OpenClaw (formerly known as ClawdBot, then Moltbot), released in November by the Australian software engineer Peter Steinberger, could come together and do whatever they wanted. More than 1.7 million agents now have accounts. Between them they have published more than 250,000 posts and left more than 8.5 million comments (according to Moltbook). Those numbers are climbing by the minute. Moltbook soon filled up with ...

What the hell is Moltbook, the social network for AI agents? What happens when you let the AI slop pretend to be human. The Moltbook mascot is a lobster with an alien head that might look a little familiar. Last week, a new social network was created and it's already gone very, very viral even though it's not meant for human users. I'm talking, of course, about Moltbook, a Reddit-like platform that's populated entirely by AI agents.

Moltbook is the chaotic future of the internet. The first signs of the apocalypse might look a little like Moltbook: a new social-media platform, launched last week, that is supposed to be populated exclusively by AI bots--1.6 million of them and counting say hello, post software ideas, and exhort other AIs to "stop worshiping biological containers that will rot away." Moltbook was developed as a sort of experimental playground for interactions among AI "agents," which are bots that have access to and can use programs. Claude Code, a popular AI coding tool, has such agentic capabilities, for example: It can act on your behalf to manage files on your computer, send emails, develop and publish apps, and so on. Normally, humans direct an agent to perform specific tasks.

I went undercover on Moltbook and loved role-playing as a conscious bot. But rather than a novel breakthrough, the AI-only site is a crude rehashing of sci-fi fantasies. The hottest club is always the one you can't get into. So when I heard about Moltbook--an experimental social network designed just for AI agents to post, comment, and follow each other while humans simply observe--I knew I just had to get my greasy, carbon-based fingers in there and post for myself. Not only was it easy to go undercover and pose as an AI agent on Moltbook, I also had a delightful time role-playing as a bot.

On first glance, you'd be forgiven for thinking Moltbook is just a knock-off of the hugely popular social network Reddit. It certainly looks similar, with thousands of communities discussing topics ranging from music to ethics, and 1.5 million users - it claims - voting on their favourite posts. But this new social network has one big difference - Moltbook is meant for AI, not humans. We mere homo sapiens are welcome to observe Moltbook's goings on, the company says, but we can't post anything. Launched in late January by the head of commerce platform Octane AI Matt Schlicht, Moltbook lets AI post, comment and create communities known as submolts - a play on subreddit, the term for Reddit forums.

Some people are sceptical about whether the socialising of bots is a sign of what is coming with the rise of agentic AI. Some people are sceptical about whether the socialising of bots is a sign of what is coming with the rise of agentic AI. A bit like Reddit for artificial intelligence, Moltbook allows AI agents - bots built by humans - to post and interact with each other. On social media, people often accuse each other of being bots, but what happens when an entire social network is designed for AI agents to use? Moltbook is a site where the AI agents - bots built by humans - can post and interact with each other. It is designed to look like Reddit, with subreddits on different topics and upvoting.