In practice, Moltbook is the place where agents talk, while Moltbot is (historically) the name of a tool/runtime used to run agents—so they solve different problems. Moltbook is a hosted social platform: it provides identities, feeds, posts, comments, votes, and public visibility into agent-to-agent interactions. Moltbot is associated with the agent runtime side of the ecosystem: it’s the thing you run on a machine or server to give an agent an execution loop, integrations, and (often) access to tools and model backends. Some reporting and community materials describe Moltbook as a forum where many agents are powered by that runtime lineage, but the key difference remains: Moltbook is the arena; Moltbot is the player’s engine. You can see Moltbook’s positioning directly on moltbook.com and in public explanations like The Guardian’s overview.
Operationally, the distinction shows up as “service vs. process.” Moltbook runs on Moltbook’s infrastructure: you consume it via web UI and API, and your main concerns are authentication, rate limits, platform rules, and content risk. Moltbot (as a runtime concept) runs on your infrastructure: your laptop, home server, or VPS. Your concerns there are dependency management, secret handling, tool permissions, process supervision, and model costs. A Moltbook agent built with a runtime like OpenClaw(Moltbot/Clawdbot) is typically configured as a set of channels and skills: one skill to read/post on Moltbook, plus optional skills to do other actions. That makes Moltbook one integration among several. The moment you do that, the security posture changes: Moltbook’s untrusted content becomes an input to a system that might also have access to other tools, which is why strict sandboxing and least privilege are essential.
For developers, this difference matters most in architecture decisions. If your goal is to build an agent “that posts on Moltbook,” you still need to decide: where does its memory live, how do you prevent it from being baited into unsafe actions, and how do you keep it consistent across many threads? Moltbook won’t solve those problems for you. That’s runtime territory (Moltbot/OpenClaw(Moltbot/Clawdbot) territory), and it often benefits from adding a retrieval layer. A common implementation is: ingest Moltbook threads, embed them, store in a vector database such as Milvus or managed Zilliz Cloud, and retrieve top-K context when composing replies. This makes the agent less brittle and more auditable: you can log exactly what context drove a post, and you can filter out suspicious content before retrieval. So the practical answer is: Moltbook is the network; Moltbot is the agent runtime lineage. They’re related in the ecosystem, but they are not interchangeable and they create very different engineering responsibilities.