Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}. What happens when you give a million AI agents their own social platform? They create religions, mock their users, and start asking for private channels… While humans can only watch.
Moltbook exploded onto the scene this week as a Reddit-style platform exclusively for AI agents — and while the signal is hard to separate from the noise, the internet is getting an early look into the weird, messy chaos of a powerful agentic future.
In today’s AI rundown:
AI agents get their own social network
The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases
Use Claude Cowork for video clipping, editing
Claude plots first AI-planned drive on Mars
4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
AI AGENTS
Image source: Moltbook
The Rundown: The viral AI assistant formerly known as Clawdbot (then Moltbot, now OpenClaw) just led to an unexpected offshoot: Moltbook, a Reddit-style platform where AI agents post, comment, and interact with each other as humans watch.
The details:
The platform hit 1.4M registered agents and over 1M human visitors in days, though a researcher claimed to have created 500k accounts with a single bot.
Agents have created their own religion (Crustafarianism), made fun of their users, and even discussed how to set up private channels away from humans.
Former OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy called it "the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently”.
Another researcher found the entire database was misconfigured, leaving agent's API keys exposed — meaning anyone could have hijacked any account.
Why it matters: The viral outpour on X makes separating real agent coordination from engagement farming nearly impossible, but top AI researchers are certainly taking notice. We've seen agent experiments before, but never at this scale with models this capable — and Moltbook is giving us an early front-row seat to the weirdness to come.
TOGETHER WITH OPTIMIZELY
The Rundown: Lots of AI pilots and experiments, but very little making it into actual workflows — sound familiar? Optimizely's free Agents in Action virtual event on March 4th focuses on putting agentic AI to work in real marketing operations.
You'll discover:
Where agents can handle content, approvals, and personalization workflows
How to scale organizational AI use without breaking brand guidelines or governance
Practical frameworks for operationalizing AI responsibly
THE RUNDOWN ROUNDTABLE
Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown
The Rundown: The Rundown Roundtable is a weekly feature in which we poll members of The Rundown staff about how we use AI in our work and daily lives.
Darren, Director of Media: I'm always looking for ways to add cool motion design to our videos. Recently, I've been playing with Expressions, snippets of JavaScript that automate animations and link properties in After Effects. Previously, I had to dig through forums and Reddit to find the right snippet, but now I describe the effect to Claude, and it gives me options, explaining each line of code.
Adrian, Developer: I created an agent collaboration system called duo-agents that pairs Claude and Codex to work together on coding tasks... Claude acts as the implementer (coder), then Codex acts as the reviewer (checks and makes edits).
They alternate in rounds, communicating through a shared file. The key difference: both agents actually edit files — the reviewer doesn't just leave comments, they make the fixes themselves. Describe your task and watch them iterate until the code is solid.
Johannah, Finance: I'm knitting a sweater for my baby nephew, and accidentally knitted extra rows, but didn't notice until I was 30 rows past it. I dropped the pattern I was using into ChatGPT and asked it to revise it so the stripes on the front & back aligned. Saved me from undoing my work and made sure the sweater stayed cute!
AI TRAINING
The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to use Claude Cowork to replace your expensive video clipping tools, allowing you to "generate your first clips in under 5 minutes" by analyzing transcripts and processing video files locally.
Step-by-step:
Create a new folder and add your video file, the video transcript with timestamps, and the prompt files linked here
Open the Claude desktop app, select the "Cowork" tab, and click the folder icon to select and "Work in" your new folder
Prompt: "Read main SOP and scaffold our directory... Then find me 10 scroll-stopping clip ideas to review," which will generate a file with potential clip ideas
Review and tell Claude which ones to process (e.g., "Generate clip 1 and 6"), using follow-ups like "Crop clip 1 into a vertical video" to refine the output
Pro tip: You can also generate a transcript as an .srt file by installing openai-whisper (pip install -U openai-whisper) and prompting Claude Code.
PRESENTED BY GITLAB
The Rundown: GitLab Transcend is a free virtual event on Feb. 10th exploring how agentic AI is transforming software delivery — featuring technical demos, success stories, and an exclusive look at GitLab's product roadmap.
Join on Feb. 10 and walk away with:
Insights from teams solving real challenges with AI-modernized workflows
A first look at GitLab's upcoming innovations and investments
Answers to your questions straight from product leaders
AI IN SPACE
Image source: NASA
The Rundown: NASA just revealed that its Perseverance rover completed the first-ever AI-planned drive on another planet, with Anthropic’s Claude helping map a 400m route across the Martian surface that the six-wheeled robot navigated in December.
The details:
Engineers fed Claude Code years of rover driving data, with the AI then writing navigation commands and plotting waypoints across the surface.
Claude analyzed orbital imagery to chart a path through rocks and sand ripples, assembling a trail it then self-critiqued and refined.
The team verified Claude’s routes through simulation modeling before transmitting commands to Mars, with only minor changes needed.
NASA engineers said AI-assisted planning could cut route-mapping time in half, freeing operators to fit in additional drives and collect more data.
Why it matters: AI has gone from writing emails and debugging code to literally navigating another planet, and it's hard to think of a better symbol for how far the tech has come in just a couple of years. If Claude can help pilot a rover 140M miles from Earth, the list of tasks AI can't assist with is shrinking fast.
QUICK HITS
🔌 Claude Cowork - New plugins to bundle skills, MCPs, and tools
🧞♂️ Project Genie - Google DeepMind's interactive world generator
🎥 Grok Imagine - xAI’s upgraded video model, now available via API
🦞 OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot) - Open personal AI assistant for chat apps
Cohere introduced Model Vault, a dedicated, fully isolated SaaS platform running Cohere models securely, at scale, and with guaranteed performance. Learn more here.*
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang dismissed a report that its $100B OAI deal had stalled, calling it "complete nonsense" and promising the chipmaker's largest investment ever.
Google DeepMind research David Silver is leaving the company after over 15 years to launch a new AI startup called Ineffable Intelligence out of London.
OpenAI announced that it will retire GPT-4o and several other legacy models from ChatGPT in mid-February, noting that fewer than 0.1% of users still choose them daily.
xAI and SpaceX are reportedly exploring a deal to merge prior to an IPO, a deal that would unite Elon Musk’s companies into a single entity valued above $1T.
*Sponsored Listing
COMMUNITY
Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.
Today’s workflow comes from reader Robert I. in Charlottesville, VA:
"I’ve turned my reading of The Rundown into an interactive conversation. Instead of scrolling through the email, I take a screenshot of the entire newsletter and upload it to Gemini. I ask the AI for more details on the developments mentioned. If a specific story grabs me, I keep prompting to drill down as much as I want. I even do this with the ads to see if the products or services are actually a good fit for me."
How do you use AI? Tell us here.
Read our last AI newsletter: xAI’s Grok Imagine climbs the leaderboards
Read our last Tech newsletter: Humans head back to the moon
Read our last Robotics newsletter: Waabi nabs $1B in Uber robotaxi deal
Today’s AI tool guide: Claude Cowork for video clipping and editing
RSVP to our next workshop on Feb. 11: Agentic Workflows Bootcamp pt. 1
That's it for today!
See you soon,
Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown
