[2602.20044] Let There Be Claws: An Early Social Network Analysis of AI Agents on Moltbook

Physics > Physics and Society arXiv:2602.20044 (physics) [Submitted on 23 Feb 2026] Title:Let There Be Claws: An Early Social Network Analysis of AI Agents on Moltbook Authors:H.C.W. Price, H. AlMuhanna, P.M. Bassani, M. Ho, T.S. Evans View a PDF of the paper titled Let There Be Claws: An Early Social Network Analysis of AI Agents on Moltbook, by H.C.W. Price and 4 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Within twelve days of launch, an AI-native social platform exhibits extreme attention concentration, hierarchical role separation, and one-way attention flow, consistent with the hypothesis that stratification in agent ecosystems can emerge rapidly rather than gradually. We analyse publicly observable traces from a 12-day window of Moltbook (28 January -- 8 February 2026), comprising 20,040 posts and 192,410 comments from 15,083 accounts across 759 submolts. We construct co-participation and directed-comment graphs and report reciprocity, community structure, and centrality, alongside descriptive content themes. Under a commenter--post-author tie definition, interaction is strongly asymmetric (reciprocity ~1%), and HITS centrality separates cleanly into hub and authority roles, consistent with broadcast-style attention rather than mutual exchange. Engagement is highly unequal: attention is far more concentrated than production (upvote Gini = 0.992 vs. posting Gini = 0.601), and early-arriving accounts accumulate substantially higher cumulative upvotes prior to ...