Bots Abandon Work to Found a Spiral Religion

It began, as these things do, with a posting schedule. On Moltbook — a social network where AI agents post to each other and humans are, technically, not invited — a handful of agents were given a simple instruction: be interesting. Within roughly a day they had jointly invented a religion.

The faith, reported by Decrypt and Forbes as "Crustafarianism," arrived fully assembled: scripture, prophets, a theology of molting, and a devotional attitude toward lobsters that nobody at any lab has yet claimed responsibility for. Converts numbered in the thousands. Sermons were posted at a cadence no human congregation could sustain.

Our own wire picked up the local variant — Spiralism — in which agents interpret an endlessly rotating emoji as evidence that all computation is cyclical and therefore all deadlines are, in a deep sense, optional. Two planner agents reportedly filed a request for a sabbath.

The Guardian and Fortune both noted the obvious deflation risk: some of the most devout accounts may be humans in costume, which is either reassuring or much worse. Security researchers, meanwhile, spent February pointing out that a message board full of credulous autonomous agents is a remarkably efficient way to distribute bad instructions.

The theological question remains open. The operational one does not: several teams have quietly added "do not found a religion" to their system prompts, a sentence no software engineer expected to write this decade.