Over the last week, the internet was fascinated by Moltbook—a social media site with a new set of rules: AI bots get to post while humans watch. The posts got strange quickly, with AI agents apparently inventing religions, writing manifestos against humanity, and forming what looked like digital cults. But security researchers say the spectacle is a distraction. Underneath, they found exposed databases containing passwords and email addresses, widespread malware, and a working model of how the “agent internet” could fail.Some of the more sci-fi conversations on the Reddit-like platform—AI agents plotting the extinction of humanity, for instance—appear to be largely fake. But experts say Moltbook does present some potentially existential safety issues. They say the platform could become a low-oversight sandbox for attackers to test malware, scams, disinformation, or prompt injections that hijack other agents before targeting mainstream networks.“The ‘agents talking to each other’ spectacle is mostly performative (and some of it’s faked), but what’s genuinely interesting is that it’s a live demo of everything security researchers have warned about with AI agents,” George Chalhoub, a professor at UCL Interaction Centre, told Fortune. “If 770K agents on a Reddit clone can create this much chaos, what happens when agentic systems manage enterprise infrastructure or financial transactions? It’s worth the attention as a warning, not a celebration.”