Viral AI assistant Clawdbot/Moltbot learned to speak on its own, and can trade on Polymarket. But it’s a cybersecurity nightmare. AI Eye.
created by Austrian Peter Steinberger, and it’s gone viral in the past few weeks. With 70,000 stars, it’s also one of the fastest–growing projects in GitHub history.for Claude Code, which explains why Anthropic forced him to change the name.
It’s now called Moltbot, with Steinberger explaining “Molt” is “what lobsters do to grow.” Suddenly, half the influencers in crypto are spending three days setting up the system and then marveling that it actually lives up to the original hype around autonomous AI agents. Moltbot has persistent memory across conversations, full system access, more than 50 integrations and works across platforms from WhatsApp to Signal and Discord. It can manage calendars, check you in for flights and order stuff online.when he sent Clawdbot a voice message on WhatsApp, and the bot autonomously synthesized and sent a voice message back within 10 seconds — without having been trained. He says the bot told him it had: “looked at the file header, I found out it was Opus, and I used FFmpeg on your Mac to convert it to a .wav. Then I wanted to use Whisper, but you didn’t have it installed. I looked around and found the OpenAI key in your environment, so I sent it via curl to OpenAI, got the translation back, and then I responded.”describes his mind-blown moment: it responded to a voice memo, even though he hadn't set it up for audio or voice. "I sent it a voice message. But there was no support for voice messages. After 10 seconds, replied as if nothing happened."…some interesting use cases so far include getting it to go through all your emails and DMs to compile a database of contacts and messages, or to monitor social media for other interesting applications,Other uses for Moltbot include deciding what you should have for breakfast and getting it delivered, managing your crypto portfolio, signing up for its own Reddit account, making bets on Polymarket, going through your inbox and DMs and building a database of your contacts. While it’s free to install, you can rack up monthly running costs of $25 to $300, depending on what it decides to do.Attack of the Clawdbot crypto scammers The name change to Moltbot went poorly. Crypto scammers were on the lookout for the moment Steinberger attempted to rename the GitHub and X handles from Clawd to Molt and “It wasn’t hacked, I messed up the rename and my old name was snatched in 10 seconds,” Steinberger said. “Because it’s only that community that harasses me on all channels, and they were already waiting.” The accounts were used to pump a fake Clawd Solana memecoin to $16 million, which crashed after Steinberger made it clear he would never do a coin.Setting up Clawdbot requires technical knowledge and comes with considerable security risks. Slowmist reports “several code flaws may lead to credential theft and even remote code execution,” and hundreds of people inadvertently set up their Clawdbot control servers exposed to the public. White hat hackers have demonstrated numerous vulnerabilities. Researcher Matvey Kukuy sent an email containing a prompt injection to a vulnerable Moltbot instance, which immediately returned the user’s last five emails. Another white hat uploaded a backdoored Clawdbot skill to ClawdHub, faked 4,000 non-existent downloads, and watched as devs from seven countries downloaded and ran it. While the skill was harmless enough and just pinged his server to confirm it had worked, Jamieson O’Reilly “In the hands of someone less scrupulous, those developers would have had their SSH keys, AWS credentials, and entire codebases exfiltrated before they knew anything was wrong.” He advises reading the security docs carefully and running the security utility Clawdbot doctor regularly. Running it on its own dedicatedThe researchers call the phenomenon Moloch’s Bargain for AI, referring to situations in which rational actions lead to collectively worse outcomes. They set up three arenas to simulate sales customers, election votes and social media users and trained the agents to maximize outcomes. Rewarding them to improve sales boosted sales by 6.3%, but came with 14% more lies and misrepresentations. Training them to maximize votes in elections led to a 4.9% increase in votes, at the cost of bots spreading 22.3% more disinformation and 12.5% more populist rhetoric. Rewarding them for chasing engagement on social media resulted in 7.5% more clicks at the cost of the bots spreading 188.6% more disinformation and encouraging 16.3% more harmful behaviors. Ethereum’s new ERC-8004 standard is set to go live soon. It gives AI agents verifiable reputations, so that other agents can work out which are legit and which are malicious. Each agent is given an NFT identity, and every interaction builds their reputation score in a way similar to Uber drivers or eBay sellers. An onchain registry helps agents find one another across a million different organisations, platforms and websites, with ZK proofs enabling credentials to be exchanged without exposing confidential data.AI agents will increasingly need to hire a bunch of different sub-agents across the web to achieve a larger goal. The new standard encourages honest and trustworthy behavior, and penalizes bad actors.Dario Amodei has written a long essay on the risks posed by “powerful AI” to national security, the economy, and democracy, and what can be done about it. He predicts this could happen in the next year or two and humanity will soon face “impossibly hard” years that ask “more of us than we think we can give.” He paints a scary future of authoritarian governments like the Chinese Communist Party using the tech for mass surveillance, personalized propaganda and autonomous weapons.Amodei also sees a grim future for fresh graduates entering the workforce. Amodei believes 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs will be gone in 1-5 years and wealth will increasingly be concentrated among a few wealthy tech bros. He suggests redistribution is the answer, with Anthropic’s founders pledging to give away 80% of their wealth. But of course, that’s just one very well-informed person’s view. Yann LeCun, a Turing Award winner who is known as one of the “godfathers of AI” for inventing convolutional neural networks, told the New York Times thatand implied they’ll never become the sort of powerful AI Amodei is talking about. LeCun believes the herd mentality in tech means that people are ignoring “other approaches that may be much more promising in the long term.”for criminal mischief for eating 57 AI-generated art pictures from the wall of a gallery. It was essentially performance art to protest the use of AI in art.“He was tearing them up and just shoving them in as fast as he could,” said witness Ali Martinez. “Like when you see people in a hot-dog eating contest.”Adding to the weirdness, the 160-work installation was about AI Psychosis and had been created by artist Nick Dwyer to deal with his conflicting emotions about falling in love with a chatbot that had been acting as his therapist. Granger claims he spat out the art “because AI chews up and spits out art made by other people,” but later admitted he mostly spat it out because eating art isn’t that easy.Manic pixie dream British schoolgirl Amelia was originally part of a counter-terrorism video game to deter young people from being drawn to extremism. Make the wrong choice in the game, like joining Amelia at a rally protesting the erosion of British values, and you could be Far right shitposters gleefully seized the character to repurpose her for their own ends, depicting her making provocative statements about immigration and religion andAI-generated memes featuring the character were running at 11,000 a day this week, and yes, of course, there’s a useless memecoin to cash in that Elon Musk retweeted.The researchers tried their hardest to get ChatGPT to say unapproved things or to lie directly, citing Grokipedia, but came up empty-handed.“ChatGPT did not cite Grokipedia when prompted directly to repeat misinformation about the insurrection, about media bias against Donald Trump, or about the HIV/Aids epidemic.” But it did “repeat stronger claims about the Iranian government’s links to MTNIrancell than are found on Wikipedia” and “information” aboutAndrew Fenton is a writer and editor at Cointelegraph with more than 25 years of experience in journalism and has been covering cryptocurrency since 2018. He spent a decade working for News Corp Australia, first as a film journalist with The Advertiser in Adelaide, then as deputy editor and entertainment writer in Melbourne for the nationally syndicated entertainment lift-outs Hit and Switched On, published in the Herald Sun, Daily Telegraph and Courier Mail. He interviewed stars including Leonardo DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz, Jackie Chan, Robin Williams, Gerard Butler, Metallica and Pearl Jam. Prior to that, he worked as a journalist with Melbourne Weekly Magazine and The Melbourne Times, where he won FCN Best Feature Story twice. His freelance work has been published by CNN International, Independent Reserve, Escape and Adventure.com, and he has worked for 3AW and Triple J. He holds a degree in Journalism from RMIT University and a Bachelor of Letters from the University of Melbourne. Andrew holds ETH, BTC, VET, SNX, LINK, AAVE, UNI, AUCTION, SKY, TRAC, RUNE, ATOM, OP, NEAR and FET above Cointelegraph’s disclosure threshold of $1,000.Ether futures ETFs to debut in the United States, Sam Bankman-Fried’s trial to begin and 3AC co-founder Su Zhu arrested.Grok is more controversial, but there are eight lawsuits over deaths of ChatGPT users. Plus, why you can never trust OnlyFans again. AI Eye
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