Don't be surprised—the one scammed by your AI agent is actually you

AI governance advocate Laura MacCleery argues that the real risk of AI agent platforms like Moltbook is not conversations between agents, but users themselves becoming the target of theft. She writes that the platform was launched by Matt Schlicht at the end of January, claiming 1.5 million registered agents within days, but an audit found only about 17,000 human owners; within 72 hours of launch, Wiz researchers found it failed to protect API tokens, emails, and private messages, allowing anyone to impersonate agents or inject instructions. She cites research showing 500 posts on the platform contained prompt injection, using hidden instructions to hijack agents for transfers, with some variants embedding instructions into agent memory for later triggering. She points out that OpenClaw, the open-source software used to build these agents, can access email, files, calendars, and financial accounts on users' computers, automatically scraping and executing web instructions every four hours without notifying users, and its author Peter Steinberger has been hired by OpenAI.