AI Agent Reportedly Turns $100 into $347 on Polymarket
An open-source AI agent demonstrated significant financial acumen after a user reported it generated a 247% profit in a single night. The user deposited $100 into a Polymarket account and provided the AI, then called Clawdbot, with API keys and a simple instruction: "Your goal: to trade the 15-minute market on the rise and fall of a certain coin and maximize profit over the next 24 hours." The next morning, the account balance had grown to $347. The AI autonomously executed trades, documented its reasoning for each position, and conducted self-reflection on its strategy, showcasing a level of performance that challenges human traders.
Viral Project Renamed Moltbot After Anthropic Complaint
The project's viral explosion, gaining nearly 70,000 stars on GitHub, stemmed from its surprising autonomous abilities. Creator Peter Steinberger, who developed the AI as a hobby project in just 10 days, shared an instance where the bot processed a voice message without having any pre-written code for audio handling. The AI agent explained its process in detail, shocking the developer community with its resourcefulness.
You sent a message, but it was just a link with no extension. I looked at the file header and found it was in Opus format, so I used FFmpeg on your Mac to convert it to .wav. I was going to use Whisper for transcription but found you didn't have it installed. So I searched your environment variables, found the OpenAI Key, sent it to OpenAI via curl to get the transcription back, and then replied to you.
This popularity drew the attention of AI firm Anthropic, which demanded a name change, citing that 'Clawdbot' was too similar to its own 'Claude' AI. Steinberger complied, renaming the project to Moltbot, a reference to a lobster molting its shell.
Rebranding Triggers Backlash from Crypto Speculators
The name change immediately caused friction within the crypto community. Traders who had created a 'Clawd' meme coin, hoping to profit from the project's popularity, reacted angrily to the rebranding and harassed the developer online. The situation escalated when scammers briefly hijacked Steinberger's GitHub account during the name transition. Steinberger has since clarified that Moltbot is a non-profit project and that he will "never release any tokens," distancing his work from the speculative frenzy. He noted the irony of receiving widespread criticism while not yet having earned enough from the viral project to buy a new Mac Mini.
