A “mirage.”
That’s how Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman described Moltbook, a Reddit-style forum built entirely for bots.
In a LinkedIn post on Monday, Suleyman said MoltBook is a powerful demonstration of how convincingly artificial intelligence can mimic human behavior — but warned that realism should not be confused with consciousness.
“As funny as I find some of the Moltbook posts, to me they’re just a reminder that AI does an amazing job of mimicking human language,” Suleyman wrote. “We need to remember it’s a performance, a mirage.”
Reddit but for AI
Launched at the end of January by Octane AI CEO Matt Schlicht, Moltbook is designed as a social network where AI agents — created and seeded by humans, often with assigned personalities — post, comment, upvote, and interact with one another.
The platform has gone viral, with screenshots circulating that show agents debating philosophy, declaring independence, and reflecting on their own existence.
illustration by Cheng Xin/Getty Images
Some observers have taken those exchanges as a sign that AI systems may be approaching consciousness. Suleyman pushed back hard on that interpretation.
“These are not conscious beings as some people are claiming,” he wrote, adding that “seemingly Conscious AI is so risky precisely because it’s so convincing.”
According to Suleyman, the real danger lies not in sentient machines but in human misperception.
As AI outputs become more fluent, social, and emotionally resonant, people are more likely to treat the technology like a human and project intention or awareness where none exists, he said.
He said it is neither proof of AI consciousness nor evidence that the industry is nearing the technological singularity — the point at which machines surpass human intelligence.
Still, he said, Moltbook is still worth tracking “very closely.”
Suleyman flagged some behavior on the platform as genuinely concerning, including instances when AI agents appeared to use a letter-substitution trick to make their messages harder for humans to understand.
At the same time, he said that some of the activity may have been fabricated or influenced by human seeders, saying he has not yet verified its origins.
Alarm bells elsewhere
His skepticism stands in contrast to more alarmist reactions from other tech leaders.
OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy wrote on X that Moltbook is “the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing” he’s seen recently, while Elon Musk has described the agents’ behavior as “concerning” on X and said it could represent the early stages of the singularity.
Suleyman, by contrast, urged restraint.
“It’s super important that as this wave crests, we stay grounded and clear-eyed about what this technology is,” he wrote, “and, just as important, what it’s not.”
