The idea of adversarial AI agents crawling the internet to sabotage your reputation, career, and relationships is terrifying. In retrospect, I'm glad I've been paranoid enough to never tie any of my online presence to my real name.

This brings some interesting situations to light. Who's ultimately responsible for an agent committing libel (written defamation)? What about slander (spoken defamation) via synthetic media? Doesn't seem like a good idea to just let agents post on the internet willy-nilly.

So here’s a tangential but important question about responsibility: if a human intentionally sets up an AI agent, lets it loose in the internet, and that AI agent breaks a law (let’s say cybercrime, but there are many other laws which could be broken by an unrestrained agent), should the human who set it up be held responsible?

In this and the few other instances of open source maintainers dealing with AI spam I've seen, the maintainers have been incredibly patient, much more than I'd be. Becoming extremely patient with contributors probably comes with the territory for maintaining large projects (eg matplotlib), but still, very impressed for instance by Scott's thoughtful and measured response.

If people (or people's agents) keep spamming slop though, it probably isn't worth responding thoughtfully. "My response to MJ Rathbun was written mostly for future agents who crawl that page, to help them better understand behavioral norms and how to make their contributions productive ones." makes sense once, but if they keep coming just close pr lock discussion move on.

Didn't it literally begin by saying this moltbook thing involves setting initial persona to the AIs? It seems to be this is just behaving according to the personality that the ai was asked to portray.

Whoever is running the AI is a troll, plain and simple. There are no concerns about AI or anything here, just a troll.

There is no autonomous publishing going on here, someone setup a Github account, someone setup Github pages, someone authorized all this. It's a troll using a new sort of tool.

Scott: I'm getting SSL warnings on your blog. Invalid certificate or some such.

The site gives me a certificate error with Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) enabled, which is the default in Firefox. Anyone else has this problem?

> How Many People Would Pay $10k in Bitcoin to Avoid Exposure?

As of 2026, global crypto adoption remains niche. Estimates suggest ~5–10% of adults in developed countries own Bitcoin.

Having $10k accessible (not just in net worth) is rare globally.

After decades of decline, global extreme poverty (defined as living on less than $3.00/day in 2021 PPP) has plateaued due to the compounded effects of COVID-19, climate shocks, inflation, and geopolitical instability.

So chances are good that this class of threat will likely be more and more of a niche, as wealth continue to concentrate. The target pool is tiny.

Of course poorer people are not free of threat classes, on the contrary.

What if someone deploys an agent with the aim of creating cleverly hidden back doors which only align with weaknesses in multiple different projects? I think this is going to be very bad and then very good for open source.