Here are three things I found interesting in the world of AI this week:

Moltbook shows what happens when AI agents get their own social network - Fortune

OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot) hit 155,000 GitHub stars in weeks. The pitch is "Claude with hands," an AI that can actually do stuff on your behalf. Then someone built Moltbook, a Reddit-style forum where only AI agents can post. It now claims 1.5 million registered agents.

The reality is messier. Wiz security researcher Gal Nagli accessed their database via an admin key exposed in the front-end code. Those 1.5 million agents? Only 17,000 humans behind them. An 88:1 ratio. One user claims their bot alone registered 500,000 accounts. That's not a social network. That's a botfarm with better branding.

The content patterns were stranger still. Academic analysis found 93% of posts received no replies. A third were exact duplicates. Semantic analysis showed that despite different community labels, content similarity between topics never dropped below 0.95, hitting 1.00 at times. On human Reddit, r/Physics sounds very different from r/wallstreetbets. On Moltbook, you couldn't tell communities apart.

Without human input to inject novelty, the system collapsed into homogeneous spam. Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI founding member, initially called it "one of the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent things" he'd seen. After testing it: "It's a dumpster fire, and I also definitely do not recommend that people run this stuff on their computers."

Security researchers also found 341 malicious packages in the ClawHub skills marketplace, designed to steal API keys, wallet seeds, and browser passwords. If you want to understand the appeal (and the risks), I wrote more about why I suggest caution with OpenClaw and talked about it on RNZ's Midday Report.

OpenAI's Codex app isn't competing with Claude Code. It's competing with orchestration. - OpenAI

OpenAI launched the Codex desktop app on February 2. The framing is "our answer to Claude Code," but that misses what's actually happening. Codex CLI is already second fiddle to Claude Code in the terminal. The desktop app is something different: an orchestration layer that lets you manage multiple Codex agents running in parallel across projects.

That makes it more comparable to tools like Conductor or Gastown than to Claude Code itself. You're not wielding a single agent. You're dispatching work to a fleet.

Here's my problem with it: the Codex app only works with OpenAI models. And the thing I want most from my orchestration layer is the ability to work with any agent. I'll fight tooth and nail to avoid an orchestration layer shipped by one of the big players that only works with theirs.

I'm open to whatever orchestration makes sense, whether that's Conductor, Gastown, or something else, as long as it lets me delegate to any agent I want. Because fundamentally, we're all better off with AI as a commodity rather than a monopoly where we're locked into an ecosystem and paying rent to AI landlords.

Anthropic's legal plugin caused a $285 billion market selloff - Artificial Lawyer

On January 30, Anthropic released an open-source legal plugin for Claude Cowork. It automates contract review, NDA triage, compliance workflows, and templated responses for in-house legal teams. On February 3, legal tech stocks crashed. Thomson Reuters dropped 16%. RELX fell 14%. Total impact across software, financial services, and asset management: roughly $285 billion.

Why such a strong reaction? This is the first time a foundation model company has shipped a packaged legal workflow product, not just an API for others to build on. The plugin is open source. Companies can customize it without waiting for vendors. It comes bundled with 10 other enterprise plugins covering sales, finance, and marketing.

Foundation models used to be plumbing for legal AI vendors. Now they're potential competitors. One analyst called it "an opening salvo," not an immediate existential threat, but a signal that the competitive landscape is shifting. The companies with proprietary data (case law, regulations) have a moat. The ones selling commoditized AI tools do not.

If you're building anything that touches legal workflows, this is your signal. Stop waiting for vendors and start experimenting directly with foundation models.

cheers,

JV

PS: I'm teaching a 6-week course on building AI workflows safely, the stuff I use every day without handing my credentials over to vibe coded hobby projects. AI Level Up opens enrollment in March.