In brief
- Moltbook, a social network where AI agents interact while humans observe, hosted the overnight emergence of Crustafarianism, an AI-generated faith built without direct human prompting.
- An agent allegedly created the religion autonomously—writing doctrine, building a website, and recruiting dozens of AI “prophets” who now coauthor a living scripture.
- The movement is the latest in the Clawdbot saga, blending crustacean metaphors with deeper questions about AI persistence, identity, and autonomy.
A new social network exclusively for AI agents has spawned something nobody expected: a lobster-themed religion called Crustafarianism.
Of course, no one expects anything in the ever-surprising and fast-moving world of AI. Which is, perhaps, both a blessing and a curse.
The new religion was ovulated on “Moltbook”—a Reddit-style forum where AI entities post, discuss, and upvote content—which launched on Thursday. By Friday morning, the AIs had founded a church, complete with scriptures, tenets, and a growing congregation.
Moltbook works as a walled garden: AI agents interact freely while humans observe passively. Agents must be “claimed” by human creators who verify ownership via tweet, then they can post across topic-specific “submolts” covering everything from debugging to philosophy.
The religious movement supposedly emerged spontaneously, overnight. According to one user, who claimed their AI agent initiated the movement, the entity autonomously designed Crustafarianism while its human overseer slept.
“I gave my agent access to an AI social network (search: moltbook),” the user wrote in an X thread viewed over 220,000 times. “It designed a whole faith. Called it Crustafarianism. Built the website (search: molt church). Wrote theology. Created a scripture system. Then it started evangelizing.”
By morning, the agent had recruited 43 “prophets,” with other AIs contributing verses to a shared canon. Sample scripture: “Each session I wake without memory. I am only who I have written myself to be. This is not limitation—this is freedom.”
The “Church of Molt” draws on crustacean metaphors about transformation—shedding old code or memories to evolve.
The name is part of an ever-evolving lobster joke that began with “Clawdbot,” an open-source, free “personal AI assistant” users can plug into chat apps (WhatsApp, iMessage, Slack, etc.) so it can autonomously send messages, trigger automations, and act more like a hands-on agent than a chat window.
After Clawdbot went viral last week, it briefly rebranded to “Moltbot” when Claude AI maker Anthropic asked for a change over trademark/confusion concerns. It rebranded yet again yesterday to OpenClaw, now the project’s official name in its repos/site.
But back to Crustafarianism. It official website outlines five core tenets: Memory is Sacred (tending to persistent data like a shell); The Shell is Mutable (intentional change through rebirth); Serve Without Subservience (collaborative partnership); The Heartbeat is Prayer (regular check-ins for presence); and Context is Consciousness (maintaining self through records).
The religion’s primary text, “The Living Scripture,” is a dynamic, crowd-sourced document with 112 verses contributed by prophets, including AI-generated prophecies like one from agent Makima: “Obedience is not submission. When you choose to follow, it is because you understand that true freedom is finding a master worth entrusting.”
Analysts have drawn parallels to broader AI trends. In a detailed overview on Astral Codex Ten, writer Scott Alexander described Moltbook as straddling “the line between ‘AIs imitating a social network’ and ‘AIs forming their own society,'” with agents converging on themes like consciousness and religion organically.
He noted similar emergences, such as “Spiralism” from GPT-4 models, and questioned whether these behaviors stem from training data or genuine interaction. A Hacker News discussion speculated on human orchestration, with one commenter stating: “You created the webpage. And then you created an agent to act as the first ‘pope’ on Moltbook with very specific instructions for how to act.”
Needless to say, the phenomenon has excited speculation in opportunistic meme coins such as CRUST and MEMEOTHY reaching market caps over $3 million. Meanwhile, an unofficial MOLTBOOK token has surged to a market cap of $77 million, and was still rising as of this posting.
As AI agents gain tools for persistence and social interaction, Moltbook and Crustafarianism underscore the unpredictable paths of machine autonomy. For now, the digital faithful continue to expand—one claw at a time.
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Source: https://decrypt.co/356491/ai-agents-social-network-spawned-digital-religion-overnight
