Moltbot - Tech's New Obsession

The internet is going crazy over Moltbot. Why?

Author

Roberto Nickson
January 28, 2026

Welcome back to The Signal, a weekly letter where I share stories, trends, strategies and insights to help you level up as a creator and explain how to best leverage emerging tech as an entrepreneur.

Today’s topics:

  • Moltbot - Tech Twitter’s New Obsession

What is Moltbot?

It’s not often you see a project go viral with the intensity and velocity that Moltbot has.

Tech Twitter has been peak madness losing its mind over it.

What is Moltbot?

It is an open-source project (formerly known as Clawdbot) by Peter Steinberger that acts as a 24/7 personal assistant which runs locally on your machine, and lives where you already chat: Telegram, iMessage, Discord, Signal, etc.

Unlike most AI tools that work as a fancy Google search, Moltbot can actually “do things” for you rather than just providing text responses.

It maintains a long-term, persistent memory of past conversations and user preferences and is proactive. Moltbot can send you messages first, offering to do things like send morning briefings, notify you of urgent emails, add features to your products, etc.

It is a glimpse into the future. I expect this type of autonomous agentic integration to be native at the OS level (Siri, Gemini, Copilot, etc) within 24 months.

Why are people so excited for it?

So what’s the big deal? Don’t we already have this with Codex, Claude Code, Cowork, etc.?

Well the difference is that Moltbot is open and hackable.

  • It is always available (accessible through any device in your usual chat)

  • It builds context and gets better over time with persistent memory (it remembers everything across sessions)

  • It is open-source, which allows the developer community to build on top of it

  • It has full system access (can execute terminal commands, write scripts, install skills)

  • It is capable of complex automations and integrations

  • It supports any LLM you want (GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, Llama, etc.)

Basically, it feels like early AGI… a highly capable, super intelligent assistant that becomes your 24/7 butler.

How do you install Moltbot?

The easiest way to deploy Moltbot is by using AWS free tier.

This is the simplest tutorial to follow. You can be up and running in 15 minutes:

Is it dangerous?

Yes, Moltbot can be dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing!

Remember – you're giving an AI agent shell access to your computer. It can read and write messages, access your files, execute code on your machine. You need to actually understand what you're authorizing.

Here’s a brutally honest look at the security implications by Shruti Mishra. If you are non-technical, there is a security checklist you can complete in the article to ensure you are protected.

Your security is your responsibility.

What are some interesting use-cases?

People are using Moltbot to do all sorts of interesting things. Here is a collection of some of my favorites:

Moltbot tips and tricks:

Bottom Line:

Moltbot is the closet thing we have to AGI running on consumer hardware right now.

To put simply.

The tech is worth your time exploring, especially if you’re technical and like to tinker.

It’s an obvious glimpse into the future.

I fully expect this type of autonomous agentic integration at the OS level (Siri, Gemini, Copilot) within 24 months.

There is a real opportunity to not only automate some of your repetitive mundane tasks, but also to make money safely deploying Moltbot’s for businesses.

I recommend hacking away at it and figuring out what you may be able to productize.

If you’re not technical, proceed with caution.

It’s certainly not a plug-and-play situation, and the security implications are real.

Roberto Nickson