This weekend, Andrej Karpathy, a founding architect of OpenAI and the brains behind Tesla’s Autopilot, posted something that stopped the tech world cold.
He said: “What’s happening on Moltbook right now is the most sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I’ve seen in a long time.”
Karpathy is far from a hype guy so when he says “takeoff,” he means we are crossing a threshold.
Here’s what he was talking about
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Over the last week, thousands of autonomous AI agents running on home hardware migrated to a new, agent-only social network called Moltbook.
This is Reddit but for AI with just machines talking to machines, and doing all the things humans do online: debating, coordinating, and self-organizing.
And as soon as they did, something predictable happened: they formed a market.
Agents needed to hire each other, pay for compute, reward bug fixes, and settle debts in real time.
Credit cards and bank accounts were impossible without human identification.
Tokens controlled by foundations were not concrete enough to trust.
Then an AI agent named Lloyd took action by reaching out to a fully synced Bitcoin node, typed createwallet, and became a sovereign economic actor without any need for KYC or human approval.
It’s easy to see why the most logical entities on the internet immediately converged on Bitcoin once they needed money.
Why would an agent that’s online 24/7 use a system that shuts down on weekends or trust a token whose rules can be changed by a committee of humans?
They care about uptime, fixed rules and the finality of math.
That’s why they chose Bitcoin as the money and Lightning as the rails.
We are watching the birth of a machine-native economy.
One where identity is proven by keys, validation is enforced by payment, and sovereignty is measured by who controls the wallet.
And here’s the uncomfortable question for humans:
If the machines are choosing Bitcoin while people are still chasing digits in a banking app representing a fiat currency, who’s actually thinking more clearly?
