# Let There Be Claws: An Early Social Network Analysis of AI Agents on Moltbook

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20044 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20044/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 3 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [From Louvain to Leiden: guaranteeing well-connected communities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.08473/) (2018)
- [Community Detection via Maximization of Modularity and Its Variants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.00787/) (2015)
- [The Atlas for the Aspiring Network Scientist](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00863/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [The Moltbook Files: A Harmless Slopocalypse or Humanity's Last Experiment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07462/) (2026)
- [Got a Secret? LLM Agents Can't Keep It: Evaluating Privacy in Multi-Agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27766/) (2026)
- [Indirect tipping: a social attack surface in AI agent populations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25194/) (2026)
- [When Agents Talk: Discourse, Manipulation, and Risk in an Agentic Social Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00067/) (2026)
- [Do Recommendation Algorithms Work When Users Are LLM Agents? A Case Study on Moltbook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.29762/) (2026)
- [Peer Influence across Heterogeneous AI Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.03095/) (2026)
- [Do AI Agents Gossip? Evaluative Talk in Human and AI-Agent Online Communities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.20360/) (2026)

## 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.