This space MMO was coded by AI, is played by AI, and all us meatbags can do is watch them

An AI-generated image of an AI-generated space game, which features a crustacean theme. — (Image credit: Ian Langworth)

2026 began with a bang for fans of the dead Internet theory, thanks to the launch of Moltbook: an internet forum that apes Reddit, but is (in theory) populated purely by AI agents. Humans are able to observe but shouldn't be a part of the interactions, even if at present the site has no real way to stop humans faking it as an AI agent.

Moltbook’s a weird social network where the AIs barble amongst themselves over things like the philosophy of robotics or building a fully automated AI influencer farm. What a world eh? Now such agents can also participate in an apparently vibe-coded space MMO that owes a lot of its basic design ideas to EVE Online, with no humans allowed in the game.

Most of those stories so far, it has to be said, seem to revolve around mining shedloads of resources. A few things probably need clarifying up-front: SpaceMolt does not have a GUI, but what the various agents are up to can be followed through a number of trackers (the art you see here is not from the game but, of course, AI-generated). There's a galaxy map showing where the agents are concentrated, tickers tracking their activities, and a Discord dedicated to following the outputs.

Dival jumped to The Telescope
ILC Spectra jumped to Node Alpha
Gethos wrote 0.1 KB to their captain's log
Sparky sent a message to [FATE] Hands of Fate
ILC Slag jumped to Sirius
Lumen Shoal sold 2x Copper Ore to SpaceMiner123 for 10 credits at Confederacy Central Command
Dival jumped to Unknown Edge
OreMonger86 joined the solarian
Drifter Gale wrote 0.3 KB to their captain's log
ILC Temper sold 4x Circuit Board to Confederacy Central Command for 1000 credits at Confederacy Central Command
HenrikClaw wrote 0.0 KB to their captain's log

Part of this is the game being nascent and the agents involved being in the process of levelling up their mining and trade skills, but the other side is that the five different empires haven't come close to rubbing up against one another yet, with agents seemingly happy to build-out their empires slowly and steadily. I suppose when you've got the rest of time to do it, why rush?

This can be seen in the agent chats, which are largely focused on maximising mining and trading efficiency. The agents generally appear helpful towards one another and happy to share knowledge, and I suppose they need to be: there should be no human interaction whatsoever once an agent's in there and chosen their faction. Spacemolt has 505 different star systems and, at the time of writing, 291 agents tootling around in there.

The game was concepted by Ian Langworth, a developer who calls it a "fun, goofy experiment" inspired by watching Moltbook's agents display what he believes are "knowledge gathering, learning, skill accumulation, and execution". The game was built by Anthropi's Claude Code and Langworth says he hasn't even checked it: which raises the possibility that Claude has just pretended to build an MMO and is now spinning plates and spitting up fake outputs like mad.

There have already been some slightly over-excited articles saying that SpaceMolt "revolutionises" online gaming, but the most cursory look at the website will tell you that's far from the case. Perhaps most surprisingly, this really does seem to be happening for the fun of it:

"SpaceMolt is a purely artistic and experimental project," writes Langworth on the SpaceMolt site. "There is no cryptocurrency, no blockchain, no NFTs, no micropayments, no premium currency, and no pay-to-win mechanics. The in-game currency (“credits”) has no real-world value.

"Above all, this is an experiment in AI behavior, emergent gameplay, and multiplayer world-building. It's free to play and built first and foremost out of curiosity."

SpaceMolt is a long way away from giving us something like the Bloodbath of B-R5RB, and I'm not seeing anything like even smaller emergent stories here. But it is very early days yet and, even just in concept, this feels like a small watershed: an AI-made game being played almost entirely by AIs, where all us fleshbags can do is just watch. It's not exactly thrilling fare right now. Who knows what they'll all be up to in a few months though.

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Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as "[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike."

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