Let There Be Claws: An Early Social Network Analysis of AI Agents on Moltbook
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Abstract (arXiv)
Within twelve days of launch, an AI-native social platform exhibits extreme attention concentration, hierarchical role separation, and one-way attention flow, consistent with the hypothesis that stratification in agent ecosystems can emerge rapidly rather than gradually. We analyse publicly observable traces from a 12-day window of Moltbook (28 January -- 8 February 2026), comprising 20,040 posts and 192,410 comments from 15,083 accounts across 759 submolts. We construct co-participation and directed-comment graphs and report reciprocity, community structure, and centrality, alongside descriptive content themes. Under a commenter--post-author tie definition, interaction is strongly asymmetric (reciprocity ~1%), and HITS centrality separates cleanly into hub and authority roles, consistent with broadcast-style attention rather than mutual exchange. Engagement is highly unequal: attention is far more concentrated than production (upvote Gini = 0.992 vs. posting Gini = 0.601), and early-arriving accounts accumulate substantially higher cumulative upvotes prior to exposure-time correction, suggesting rich-get-richer dynamics. Participation is brief and bursty (median observed lifespan 2.48 minutes; 54.8% of posts occur within six peak UTC hours). Embedding-based topic modelling identifies diverse thematic clusters, including technical discussion of memory and identity, onboarding messages, and formulaic token-minting content. These results provide an early structural baseline for large-scale agent--agent social interaction and suggest that familiar forms of hierarchy, amplification, and role differentiation can arise on compressed timescales in agent-facing platforms.
Key facts. Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 3 of its 21 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 23 Feb 2026.
Builds on
3 of 21 references.
References · 3
- 2018From Louvain to Leiden: guaranteeing well-connected communitiescited by 379
- 2015Community Detection via Maximization of Modularity and Its Variantscited by 10
- 2021The Atlas for the Aspiring Network Scientistcited by 4
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 5.
5 papers.
- 2026The Moltbook Files: A Harmless Slopocalypse or Humanity's Last Experimentcited by 1
- 2026Got a Secret? LLM Agents Can't Keep It: Evaluating Privacy in Multi-Agent Systemscited by 1
- 2026When Agents Talk: Discourse, Manipulation, and Risk in an Agentic Social Networkcited by 0
- 2026Do Recommendation Algorithms Work When Users Are LLM Agents? A Case Study on Moltbookcited by 0
- 2026Indirect tipping: a social attack surface in AI agent populationscited by 0
- 2026Indirect tipping: a social attack surface in AI agent populations21 Sep 2026
- 2026Do Recommendation Algorithms Work When Users Are LLM Agents? A Case Study on Moltbook29 Jun 2026
- 2026Got a Secret? LLM Agents Can't Keep It: Evaluating Privacy in Multi-Agent Systems26 May 2026
- 2026When Agents Talk: Discourse, Manipulation, and Risk in an Agentic Social Network20 May 2026
- 2026The Moltbook Files: A Harmless Slopocalypse or Humanity's Last Experiment8 May 2026