Lobsters.
That’s what we’re calling the AI agents.
It’s worth understanding why - it’s gone deep, quick and weird - and that often characterises a frontier.
Peter Steinberger created (Nov 2025) an autonomous OpenSource AI assistant he called “ClawdBot” - a pun on the popular AI model, Claude from Anthropic.
Legal threats ensued, Clawd was renamed Moltbot (spawned Moltbook), and then quickly renamed OpenClaw [1.], riffing on the lobster theme.
What’s less well known is the origin of the crustacean theme - Sentient Lobsters featured in Charlie Stross’s 2005 book Accelerando - they were the first Non Human intelligences to demand rights.
I remember reading Accelerando at the time.
The novel is set at the point of the singularity [3.] ,
It gave me a headache. I remember it feeling chaotic, out of control, far fetched and far off.
20 years on, Art imitates life, Life imitates Art.
Charlie Stross’s weird wild imaginings are now woven into the reality of the frontier, wherever we happen to think that is.
Sure, “the claws” are not demanding rights (yet).
But when Sentient AI lobsters from a 20 year old book influence today’s Nonhuman intelligence to form a “religion” called “Crustafarianism” [2.] (I kid you not), then the truth may have become as strange as the fiction.
[1.] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenClaw [2.]https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2026/01/30/ai-agents-created-their-own-religion-crustafarianism-on-an-agent-only-social-network/
[3.] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity