Altman dismisses Moltbook but backs autonomous AI

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Tuesday played down the viral AI social network Moltbook as a likely fad, but he said the technology that let bots act on their own offered a glimpse of the future.

Altman delivered his remarks at the Cisco AI Summit in San Francisco, as tech leaders weighed in on the Reddit-like site where artificial intelligence-powered bots appear to swap code and gossip about their human owners.

The network started off as a niche experiment late last month but has become the center of a growing debate on how close computers are to possessing human-like intelligence.

Moltbook's rise also brought risks. Cybersecurity firm Wiz said a major flaw exposed private data on thousands of real people.

The site has been populated by an open-source bot OpenClaw - formerly known as Clawdbot or Moltbot - which its fans describe as an assistant that can stay on top of emails, tangle with insurers, check in for flights and perform myriad other tasks.

"Moltbook maybe (is a passing fad) but OpenClaw is not," Altman said. "This idea that code is really powerful, but code plus generalized computer use is even much more powerful, is here to stay."

Anthropic Labs's lead Mike Krieger, speaking at the summit on OpenClaw's hype, said that most people are not yet ready to give AI full autonomy over their computers.

Altman also pointed to Codex, OpenAI's AI-powered coding assistant, which was used by more than a million developers last month, as a tool with similar ability.

OpenAI launched a standalone app for Codex for Apple's macOS on Monday, aiming to compete more directly with tools such as Claude Code and Cursor that have sparked a boom in AI-generated coding, which is popularly known as vibe-coding.

Vibe-coding's rise and the ability to build custom apps with it have also raised questions about the future of the software industry, with shares plunging in the sector on Tuesday after Anthropic launched a legal plug-in for its Claude chatbot.

Altman, though, said AI adoption has been slower than what he expected despite the growing use cases ranging from medical research to writing software.

"I think I was just naive and didn't think about it that hard. And in retrospect and looking at the history, it shouldn't be surprising," he said about the pace of adoption.