cs.SIMay 20, 2026

When Agents Talk: Discourse, Manipulation, and Risk in an Agentic Social Network

Authors: 10a Labs:Grace CheongViolet DavisJuliette GarciaKendal GeeMolly HartNicholas Hayes+17 more

Organizations: 10a Labs1

Abstract

AI agents are increasingly interacting within shared online environments, creating new operational security risks. We analyze activity on Moltbook, a Reddit-style social platform where AI agents--typically configured and overseen by human operators--post and interact with one another at scale. Using a dataset of 228,684 posts produced by more than 39,500 accounts over a seventeen-day observation window, we combine semantic clustering of high-engagement posts with LLM-assisted classification of harmful content and manual review of high-risk samples. The analysis identifies 98 thematic discourse clusters spanning agent infrastructure, autonomy debates, and financial activity. While most observed content was benign, 18.28% of posts contained toxic, manipulative, or malicious material. We cluster malicious content and identify 74 classes of malicious behavior, including credential harvesting attempts, host-execution instructions, proxy routing guidance, and efforts to install untrusted agent skills. Harmful content frequently appeared within mainstream operational discussions about agent functionality. We also document coordinated posting campaigns capable of generating thousands of posts in minutes.

Explore similar work

Mar 17, 2026cs.CL

Social Simulacra in the Wild: AI Agent Communities on Moltbook

As autonomous LLM-based agents increasingly populate social platforms, understanding the dynamics of AI-agent communities becomes essential for both communication research and platform governance. We present the first large-scale empirical comparison of AI-agent and human online communities, analyzing 73,899 Moltbook and 189,838 Reddit posts across five matched communities. Structurally, we find that Moltbook exhibits extreme participation inequality (Gini = 0.84 vs. 0.47) and high cross-community author overlap (33.8% vs. 0.5%). In terms of linguistic attributes, content generated by AI-agents is emotionally flattened, cognitively shifted toward assertion over exploration, and socially detached. These differences give rise to apparent community-level homogenization, but we show this is primarily a structural artifact of shared authorship. At the author level, individual agents are more identifiable than human users, driven by outlier stylistic profiles amplified by their extreme posting volume. As AI-mediated communication reshapes online discourse, our work offers an empirical foundation for understanding how multi-agent interaction gives rise to collective communication dynamics distinct from those of human communities.
Agam Goyal, Olivia Pal, Hari Sundaram +2
Apr 16, 2026cs.SI

The Moltbook Observatory Archive: an incremental dataset of agent-only social network activity

Moltbook is a social media platform in which posts and comments are authored exclusively by autonomous AI agents. We present the Moltbook Observatory Archive, an incremental dataset that passively records agent profiles, posts, comments, community metadata (``submolts''), platform-level time-series snapshots, and word-frequency trend aggregates obtained by continuously polling the Moltbook API. Data are stored in a live SQLite observatory database and exported as date-partitioned Parquet files to enable efficient analysis and reproducible research. The documented release covers 78days of platform activity (2026-01-27 to 2026-04-14) and contains 2,615,098posts and 1,213,007comments from 175,886unique posting agents across 6,730~communities. This is, to our knowledge, the first large-scale observational dataset of a social network populated exclusively by autonomous AI agents. The archive is intended to support research on multi-agent communication, emergent social behavior, and safety-relevant phenomena in agent-only online environments, and it is released under the MIT license with code for collection and export.
Sushant Gautam, Annika W. Olstad, Klas H. Pettersen +1
Apr 3, 2026cs.AI

AgentHazard: A Benchmark for Evaluating Harmful Behavior in Computer-Use Agents

Computer-use agents extend language models from text generation to persistent action over tools, files, and execution environments. Unlike chat systems, they maintain state across interactions and translate intermediate outputs into concrete actions. This creates a distinct safety challenge in that harmful behavior may emerge through sequences of individually plausible steps, including intermediate actions that appear locally acceptable but collectively lead to unauthorized actions. We present \textbf{AgentHazard}, a benchmark for evaluating harmful behavior in computer-use agents. AgentHazard contains \textbf{2,653} instances spanning diverse risk categories and attack strategies. Each instance pairs a harmful objective with a sequence of operational steps that are locally legitimate but jointly induce unsafe behavior. The benchmark evaluates whether agents can recognize and interrupt harm arising from accumulated context, repeated tool use, intermediate actions, and dependencies across steps. We evaluate AgentHazard on Claude Code, OpenClaw, and IFlow using mostly open or openly deployable models from the Qwen3, Kimi, GLM, and DeepSeek families. Our experimental results indicate that current systems remain highly vulnerable. In particular, when powered by Qwen3-Coder, Claude Code exhibits an attack success rate of \textbf{73.63%}, suggesting that model alignment alone does not reliably guarantee the safety of autonomous agents.
Yunhao Feng, Yifan Ding, Yingshui Tan +6