This week, Meta acquired Moltbook, the “social network for AI agents”. Moltbook gained widespread attention in January after screenshots showed bots plotting to develop a secret, encrypted language to organise against humans. Andrej Karpathy, the former director of AI at Tesla, called it the most incredible sci-fi-adjacent thing he’d ever seen. Elon Musk said it signalled the early stages of the singularity.

Then, security researchers found that the viral posts were written by humans who exploited an unsecured database to advertise apps. The platform’s 1.5 million “agents” traced back to roughly 17,000 actual human owners, and one researcher had registered a million fake accounts with a for-loop script. MIT Technology Review called Moltbook “peak AI theatre”, but Meta bought it anyway.

Does this mean Meta wants to build a fake social media network? Not quite. The Moltbook story isn’t about bots having little conversations with each other. It’s about building a new internet — one in which humans describe what they want, and then an agent scurries around various sites, interacting with other agents to find it. There would be no endless scrolling and searching to find something a human needs. Instead, the AI bot interacts with other AI bots in order to perform a task for the user. The web still exists underneath all of this, but the humans stop interacting with it. If the internet killed the shopping mall, then AI is killing the internet as we know it.

While some fret about the consequences of letting AI bots roam free, there’s a possibility that this new internet would be safer. One underrated upside of all this is that it probably kills online exploitation. An AI agent won’t get tricked by a deceptive cancellation flow or accidentally click “yes, charge me $14.99/month”. Adversarial UX design — the thing that has made cancelling a gym membership feel so impossible that you just say “forget it” and give up — becomes useless when there is no human user.

This doesn’t mean it will be a totally free and honest system. If a human’s agent is negotiating with a retailer’s agent, they need to know whose side each one is really on. Commerce is fundamentally a middle ground between what the customer wants and the market’s need to extract maximum value from that customer. Uber outlined this clearly: “surge prices” left users bitter at the company, so bosses hid that label while still charging different prices at peak times. But then Uber started charging different riders different prices for the same trip. AI agents could act in the same way, hiding their negotiations and just showing the user the final price.

Then there’s social media. If agents handle the discovery and purchasing of products, the influencer — whose entire purpose is being a trusted human filter between the user and consumption — is finished. AI agents don’t need our trust; they will simply know our tastes inside and out.

Ultimately, the Moltbook acquisition is about the next stage in the internet’s evolution and being at the forefront of it. Meta believes that by hiring the engineers who design this, it can set the rules. The question is whether what comes next will be better for consumers. It promises to be a much more efficient way of getting what users need out of the internet. Yet it could just be a different kind of opacity, where we never quite know what our agent agreed to or what it gave away about us.

The real lesson of Moltbook is not that AI agents briefly fooled some very smart people. It is that the internet is quietly being redesigned around them. In the next phase of the web, humans may stop browsing, searching and comparing altogether. We will simply give out instructions and let bots negotiate on our behalf. That could make the internet faster, cleaner and less manipulative. Or it could make it even harder to see how decisions are made and who profits from them. Either way, the most important users of the internet may soon no longer be human.

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Katherine Dee is a writer. To read more of her work, visit defaultfriend.substack.com.

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