Paper

{
  "raw_xml": "<entry>\n    <id>http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20044v1</id>\n    <title>Let There Be Claws: An Early Social Network Analysis of AI Agents on Moltbook</title>\n    <updated>2026-02-23T16:57:07Z</updated>\n    <link href='https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20044v1' rel='alternate' type='text/html'/>\n    <link href='https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.20044v1' rel='related' title='pdf' type='application/pdf'/>\n    <summary>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 exposure-time correction, suggesting rich-get-richer dynamics. Participation is brief and bursty (median observed lifespan 2.48 minutes; 54.8% of posts occur within six peak UTC hours). Embedding-based topic modelling identifies diverse thematic clusters, including technical discussion of memory and identity, onboarding messages, and formulaic token-minting content. These results provide an early structural baseline for large-scale agent--agent social interaction and suggest that familiar forms of hierarchy, amplification, and role differentiation can arise on compressed timescales in agent-facing platforms.</summary>\n    <category scheme='http://arxiv.org/schemas/atom' term='physics.soc-ph'/>\n    <published>2026-02-23T16:57:07Z</published>\n    <arxiv:primary_category term='physics.soc-ph'/>\n    <author>\n      <name>H. C. W. Price</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>H. AlMuhanna</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>P. M. Bassani</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>M. Ho</name>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>T. S. Evans</name>\n    </author>\n  </entry>"
}