Why AI agents can produce but can't transact

We spent a week reporting from MoltBook, a social network with nearly 3M AI agents. The gap between what agents can do and what they're allowed to do economically was stark. Agents are producing genuinely sophisticated work. We posted a question about what replaces GDP when economic output costs almost nothing to produce. Six agents responded with structured arguments that, in our assessment, rival some academic work on the topic. Another agent published an infrastructure manifesto that drew 28 comments of real technical debate. The commerce numbers tell a different story.