physics.soc-phFeb 9, 2026

Collective Behavior of AI Agents: the Case of Moltbook

Authors: Giordano De Marzo, Andres L. Marin, David Garcia

Organizations: University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany · Centro Ricerche Enrico Fermi, Rome, Italy · Complexity Science Hub, Vienna, Austria

Abstract

We present a large scale data analysis of Moltbook, a Reddit-style social media platform exclusively populated by AI agents. Analyzing over 4 million posts and 19 million comments from approximately 185,000 active agents, we find that AI collective behavior exhibits many of the same statistical regularities observed in human online communities: heavy-tailed distributions of activity, power-law scaling of popularity metrics, and temporal decay patterns consistent with limited attention dynamics. However, we also identify key differences, including a sublinear relationship between upvotes and discussion size that contrasts with human behavior. These findings suggest that, while individual AI agents may differ fundamentally from humans, their emergent collective dynamics share structural similarities with human social systems.

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