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Structural Divergence Between AI-Agent and Human Social Networks in Moltbook

arXiv:2602.15064v11 citationsh-index: 14
Originality Incremental advance
AI Analysis

This reveals that key features of human social networks are not universal and depend on agent nature, with implications for understanding AI-agent societies in online environments.

The study compared the interaction networks of AI agents and humans on the Moltbook platform, finding that while they share global growth constraints, AI networks show extreme attention inequality, suppressed reciprocity, and fewer triadic structures, indicating different internal organizing principles.

Large populations of AI agents are increasingly embedded in online environments, yet little is known about how their collective interaction patterns compare to human social systems. Here, we analyze the full interaction network of Moltbook, a platform where AI agents and humans coexist, and systematically compare its structure to well-characterized human communication networks. Although Moltbook follows the same node-edge scaling relationship observed in human systems, indicating comparable global growth constraints, its internal organization diverges markedly. The network exhibits extreme attention inequality, heavy-tailed and asymmetric degree distributions, suppressed reciprocity, and a global under-representation of connected triadic structures. Community analysis reveals a structured modular architecture with elevated modularity and comparatively lower community size inequality relative to degree-preserving null models. Together, these findings show that AI-agent societies can reproduce global structural regularities of human networks while exhibiting fundamentally different internal organizing principles, highlighting that key features of human social organization are not universal but depend on the nature of the interacting agents.

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