Moltbot Is Taking Over Silicon Valley

Dan Peguine, a tech entrepreneur and marketing consultant based in Lisbon, lets a precocious, lobster-themed AI assistant called Moltbot run much of his life.

Peguine, a self-professed early adopter and trendspotter, discovered Moltbot several weeks ago—back then it was Clawdbot—after discussing a vibe-coding side project with friends on WhatsApp. He installed it on his computer, connected it to numerous apps and online accounts, including Google Apps, and was astonished by how capable it was.

“I tried it, got interested, then got really obsessed,” Peguine says. “I could basically automate anything. It was magical.”

Moltbot makes regular AI assistants, like Siri and Alexa, seem quaint. The AI assistant is designed to run constantly on a user’s computer and communicate with different AI models, applications, and online services to get stuff done. Users can talk to it through WhatsApp, Telegram, or another chat app. While normal assistants are limited in the questions they can answer and the tasks they can perform, Moltbot can do an almost limitless range of chores involving different apps, coding, and using the web.

Peguine has his Moltbot, called “Pokey,” give him morning briefings, organize his workday to maximize productivity, arrange meetings, manage calendar conflicts, and deal with invoices. Pokey even warns him and his wife when his kids have an upcoming test or homework due.

Peguine is just one of many new Moltbot disciples. The AI assistant has blown up on social media in recent days as developers, business types, and tech enthusiasts discovered its impressive powers of organization, automation, and all-round helpfulness.

“It’s the first time I have felt like I am living in the future since the launch of ChatGPT,” declared Dave Morin, another Moltbot fan, on X.

“It gives the same kick as when we first saw the power of ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Claude Code,” wrote Abhishek Katiyar, an X user who says he works at Amazon. “You realize that a fundamental shift is happening.”

“The future is here,” was a common refrain among the Moltbot-pilled.

Although agentic AI is notoriously imperfect, some Moltbot fanboys are evidently automating high-stakes stuff.

André Foeken, CTO of a health care company in the Netherlands, says he gave Moltbot his credit card details and Amazon login, then sent it a message to have it buy things for him. “I had it scanning my messages and it auto ordered some stuff. Which is both cool and the reason I turned scanning messages off 🤣,” Foeken told WIRED in a message. Other users posted screenshots of Moltbot performing research and dispensing stock-trading advice.

Moltbot fandom reached such giddy heights in recent days that the idea of buying a Mac Mini in order to run the new assistant quickly became a meme, with users joking about deploying the assistant in increasingly absurd ways. Remarkably, interest in Moltbot apparently triggered a rally in the stock price for Cloudflare, even though it has no connection to the company.

Lobster Origins

Moltlbot was released by independent developer Peter Steinberger as Clawdbot last November. (He rebranded it this week at the request of Anthropic, which offers several artificial intelligence models named Claude.)

Steinberger says he started building Moltbot as an experimental way to feed images and other files into coding models. He realized he was onto something bigger when he tried sending a voice memo into his proto-assistant and was shocked to see it type a reply back to him.

“I wrote, ‘How the F did you do that?’” Steinberger says. His tool explained that it had inspected the file, recognized it as an audio format, and found a key on his computer that could be used to access an OpenAI voice transcription service called Whisper. It then converted it to text and read it. “That was the moment I was like, holy shit,” he says. “Those models are really creative if you give them the power.”