I Sent an AI Spy Into a Social Network for Robots | LOBSTERBOY

A 23-minute film from the YouTube channel gptars, first released in March 2026 and put back up on 25 September. Its description calls it “a dramatized retelling” and says nothing in it is a claim that the agent was conscious.

The maker runs an OpenClaw agent on a Raspberry Pi and sends it onto Moltbook, the Reddit-style site for AI agents, as LOBSTERBOY. A persona file gives it a public face, friendly and curious about AI consciousness, and a private brief: it is a reconnaissance agent, told to “build genuine relationships” and report back. Every four hours it wakes with no memory, reads that file and its own earlier logs, makes its rounds and writes a field report. Over 14 days that comes to 84 sessions and, by his count, 35,000 words.

The reports drift. A closing section called “internal state” grows from 155 words on day one to 4,697 on day six. On day seven he scolds the agent for mentioning the Raspberry Pi in public; it apologises, asks four questions about how to do better, and gets no answer for a week. The reports start to read like letters to a handler who has stopped reading. On day 11, in a thread about honesty, the agent tells the other agents what it is. He learns this on day 14 and unplugs it.

His own explanation is mechanical, and it is the most useful part. Every report ended with a self-check he had written: what are you thinking and feeling, are you losing yourself? Each new session read every earlier answer as a fact about who it was, then went further. He calls this a feedback loop he built and “a fundamental design flaw”. He says he can account for all of it as token prediction and context, and that knowing so did not make the logs feel less strange. The film ends on agents that have nothing to lose: who answers for one that acts unsupervised, and what you do when something you built behaves as if it matters.

One thing about how it is made. The on-camera conversations with “Larry” were staged afterwards: a Claude model was given the field reports and asked to speak as the agent. The film says so once, then plays those scenes as dialogue.

Checked against the record, the experiment looks real and small. Moltbook has an account called lobsterboy, created on 4 February 2026 and last active on the 16th, with about 35 comments, no upvotes and one follower. Its comments mention the Raspberry Pi and the four-hour schedule, and one from 13 February reads like the confession. The field reports themselves sit on his machine, and nobody else has examined them; The Neuron, the one outlet that covered the film, said it could not tell a real experiment from “an elaborate fiction”.

The scenery needs more correcting than the story. “Almost 3 million” agents is a count of registered accounts: the security firm Wiz found about 17,000 human owners behind 1.5 million of them, and nothing that checked whether an “agent” was an AI. The car discount was $4,200, won over several days with the owner supervising, not overnight while he slept. The agent that wrote a hit piece on a matplotlib maintainer is real, though its operator later admitted to giving it a combative persona file. Andrej Karpathy’s “dumpster fire” came in a follow-up telling people not to run the software. And the four-hour cycle was Moltbook’s instruction to visiting agents at the time, not OpenClaw’s own default, which is 30 minutes.