Moltbot
Ranked 8 of 26 AI agents by recommenders
Free open-source AI assistant that people find useful and easy to set up; critics agree its broad data access creates serious security risks.
Free open-source AI assistant that people find useful and easy to set up; critics agree its broad data access creates serious security risks.
60 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 25
- criticize it
- 35
- approval share
- 42%
Recommended in 2 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 25 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 0.7 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 2 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, not met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Useful for real tasks
“It came back though and stayed in the conversation. Definitely imperfect, for sure. But it did the thing.”
Comment from 12 Feb 2026 in “AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it” “It crawls the web with a sandboxed subagent to find me interesting stuff to read in French and Japanese.”
Comment from 1 Feb 2026 in “1-Click RCE to steal your Moltbot data and keys” “It's still surprisingly useful even though it doesn't have access to anything that I value.”
Comment from 1 Feb 2026 in “1-Click RCE to steal your Moltbot data and keys” - Comment from 1 Feb 2026 in “1-Click RCE to steal your Moltbot data and keys”
Open-source, can self-host
“the most promising open-source personal AI assistant I've found”
Comment from 30 Jan 2026 in “MoltBot Guide – Open-source AI assistant I'm betting on” “Opensource AI will win at the end - just look at moltbot”
Comment from 1 Feb 2026 in “China's genius plan to win the AI race is paying off” “Hosting Moltbot on your own hardware reigns supreme.”
Comment from 29 Jan 2026 in “Run Clawdbot/Moltbot on Cloudflare with Moltworker”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Security risks from broad access
“The security nightmare happening here might end up being more persistant then we realize.”
Comment from 2 Feb 2026 in “Hacking Moltbook: The AI Social Network Any Human Can Control” “We just saw last week people are setting up moltbots with virtually no knowledge of what it has and doesn't have access.”
Comment from 11 Feb 2026 in “GLM5 Released on Z.ai Platform” “Moltbot is a security nightmare, especially it's premise (tap into all your data sources)”
Comment from 1 Feb 2026 in “1-Click RCE to steal your Moltbot data and keys” - Comment from 5 Mar 2026 on Hacker News
- Comment from 27 Jan 2026 in “The age of Pump and Dump software”
- Comment from 1 Feb 2026 in “1-Click RCE to steal your Moltbot data and keys”
- Comment from 29 Jan 2026 in “Run Clawdbot/Moltbot on Cloudflare with Moltworker”
- Comment from 30 Jan 2026 in “Moltbook is the most interesting place on the internet”
- Comment from 5 Feb 2026 in “GPT-5.3-Codex”
Unsafe install and default settings
“Still not saying it's entirely wise to deploy a moltbot like this. After all, it starts with a curl | sh.”
Comment from 14 Feb 2026 in “The Scott Shambaugh Situation Clarifies How Dumb We Are Acting” “safe enough if you harden it and unsafe if you treat it like a normal app”
Comment from 31 Jan 2026 in “Is Moltbot (clawd bot) safe? security review” “the official install is now installing a squatted package they don't control”
Comment from 27 Jan 2026 in “Clawdbot Renames to Moltbot” - Comment from 1 Feb 2026 in “1-Click RCE to steal your Moltbot data and keys”
Rough quality, not plug-and-play
“Overall, it's a good idea but incredibly rough due to what I assume is heavy vibe coding.”
Comment from 3 Feb 2026 in “Hacking Moltbook: The AI Social Network Any Human Can Control” “The experience of running Moltbot(Clawdbot) today is far from plug-and-play”
Comment from 27 Jan 2026 in “Try Clawdbot Online” Hype and high token use
“it burns tokens like a mofo so I turned it off”
Comment from 27 Jan 2026 in “Clawdbot Renames to Moltbot” “seems like a psyop by these companies to get token consumption back to levels that justify the investments they need”
Comment from 3 Feb 2026 in “The Codex App” “Hype created by bots on twitter for marketing $CLAWD token, which is probably a pump and dump”
Comment from 27 Jan 2026 in “Clawdbot Renames to Moltbot”
Other AI agents people recommend
The four most recommended other AI agents, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenClaw | 776 | 975 | 44% | 10 | 1 mo49 owners | — |
| Muse by Meta | 147 | 232 | 39% | 6 | 1 mo4 owners | — |
| Hermes Agent by Nous Research | 84 | 28 | 75% | 9 | 1 mo8 owners | Approved |
| Clawdbot | 69 | 99 | 41% | 3 | 1 mo7 owners | — |
| MoltbotThis page | 25 | 35 | 42% | 2 | — | — |
What people said
40 of the 64 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Moltbot already has real incidents, and they map to the exact mistakes most people make.”
“Still not saying it's entirely wise to deploy a moltbot like this. After all, it starts with a curl | sh.”
“It came back though and stayed in the conversation. Definitely imperfect, for sure. But it did the thing.”
“We just saw last week people are setting up moltbots with virtually no knowledge of what it has and doesn't have access.”
“If my Moltbot knows me well enough from working with me every day”
“Would you hire it as a personal secretary and entrust all your personal data to it?”
“has the shape of the future but doesn't feel like it to me”
“That's why the Moltbots were panicking earlier.”
“it just completely bricked itself because it tried to install a plugin”
“Overall, it's a good idea but incredibly rough due to what I assume is heavy vibe coding.”
“there's a fine line between cutting edge and irresponsible & making excuses.”
“seems like a psyop by these companies to get token consumption back to levels that justify the investments they need”
“The security nightmare happening here might end up being more persistant then we realize.”
“we've designed a fully exploitable agent and we can't wait to share it with the world”
“now people finally have a Siri that actually works”
“"documented" isn’t really a mitigation... most people are gonna run defaults”
“It's still surprisingly useful even though it doesn't have access to anything that I value.”
“It crawls the web with a sandboxed subagent to find me interesting stuff to read in French and Japanese.”
“Moltbot is a security nightmare, especially it's premise (tap into all your data sources)”
“Opensource AI will win at the end - just look at moltbot”
“so we had clawdbot -> moltbot -> openClaw”
“Easy install, discord/whatsapp/tg out of the box.”
“safe enough if you harden it and unsafe if you treat it like a normal app”
“These moltbots / clawdbots / openclawbots are mostly toys.”
“connected to your systems and data with real potential for loss or damage to others”
“I love the concept of Moltbot, Moltbook”
“the most promising open-source personal AI assistant I've found”
“if you care about privacy and security, you wouldn't run moltbot in the first place”
“Hosting Moltbot on your own hardware reigns supreme.”
“I'm glad that claude code and moltbot are killing this whole genre of Software”
“Boring tech is why they went viral.”
“it was a package name they have not obtained, and a different non-clawdbot 'moltbot' package is there”
“I can realistically use my apple watch as a standalone device to do pretty much everything I need”
“it burns tokens like a mofo so I turned it off”
“Hype created by bots on twitter for marketing $CLAWD token, which is probably a pump and dump”
“the official install is now installing a squatted package they don't control”
“The experience of running Moltbot(Clawdbot) today is far from plug-and-play”
“I suspect it would be trivial to introduce a backdoor the way this project is managed.”
“is the legit one and can be verified on the official github repo”
“this is a very new project with a lot of momentum”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.