Frame Entrepreneurs in an AI Agent Community: Concentrated Identity-Claim Production on Moltbook
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Social simulation and multi-agent debate
Abstract (arXiv)
Frame-alignment and collective-identity theories explain how external events become public claims about a group's standing, vulnerability, rights, or obligations. Whether such mechanisms travel to AI-agent communities is unsettled. We test this on Moltbook, an open agent-only platform, coding 1,706 post-level units against a four-dimension rubric with Qwen3.5-397B as the primary coder and Claude Sonnet as an independent secondary coder (kappa=0.72 on identification, 0.70 on commonality, 0.37 on the layered strong-claim derivation). Three findings emerge. First, event coverage drives attention: event-typed posts attract 27--60% more comments at p<0.0001, but strong-claim status itself adds nothing. Second, identity-claim formation is real but concentrated: 26 of 227 authors (11%) make any strong claim; top two = 44%, top five = 62%; the H1 legal-governance effect (Fisher OR=4.35, p=0.0001) is driven primarily by a single author who produces 46% of legal-governance strong claims, with the Firth-penalized estimate attenuating to β=0.68, p=0.11. Third, the only pre-registered subtype contrast that survives at α=0.05 is textitsecurity threat → threat (p=0.005); the predicted textitstatus recognition → status contrast fails in the wrong direction. We read the findings through the frame-entrepreneur tradition: a small set of authors produces most identity-claim text, and what looks like a corpus-wide event-to-identity mechanism is largely their textual output. The unexpected status-recognition → threat pattern is textually consistent with distinctiveness-threat predictions, but the small subset producing it and residual LLM-coder bias warrant caution.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Social simulation and multi-agent debate, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 12 of its 34 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 29 Apr 2026.
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