Zoë Schiffer: I think also it’s a good moment to bring in the IP angle. You might be asking yourself, why did ClawdBot change its very cute name to MoltBot? And that’s a great question. Apparently it’s because Anthropic, which makes many products named Claude, said, “No, no, no, this is not OK. This person and this app are not associated with our company.” And so he chose Moltbot because I think Lobster’s Molt?
Brian Barrett: Yeah, it’s a very poetic because it was C-L-A-W-D bot. So the molting is the shedding of the Shell, I think? So it’s shedding the ClawdBot name.
Zoë Schiffer: Beautiful.
Brian Barrett: … to become Moltbot.
Zoë Schiffer: Although he did hint at Will that he plans to change it, if not back to something else in the future. So stay tuned.
Brian Barrett: I want to say too, this may seem like far away for a lot of people. The idea of, I’m probably not going to buy a Mac Mini and set up Moltbot tomorrow, but I do use Google Chrome, and there’s more AI agent news happening there. Google just Wednesday announced an autobrowse feature in Chrome. This is for if you have a paid AI plan with Google, but it is sort of similar in that Google is giving you an AI agent that will browse the web for you, go shopping for you, book flights for you. That is much more mainstream, and built into by far the most popular browser in the world and going to be a lot of people’s, I think, first introduction to AI agents, especially if and as they take it out of those paid tiers, and make it available to everybody, which you can definitely see them doing. They’ve done that with other AI products in the past.
Tim Marchman: I just hope people are segmenting things here, and that for instance, if you want to play around with this and give it access to your credit card information, you’re giving it a card that you would not prevent you from being able to pay your mortgage if it got drained through some malware injection. Use common sense here.
Zoë Schiffer: Well, now you heard it here first, unlike the President of the United States and seemingly Elon Musk, Tim Marchman is pro data silos, if you remember that executive order.
Brian Barrett: Look at that.
Zoë Schiffer: I think WIRED.com is pro data silos for the most part.
Brian Barrett: Yeah. We love a data silo.
Zoë Schiffer: Coming up after the break, we’ll share our WIRED/TIRED picks for the week. Stay with us.
It’s time for the WIRED/TIRED segment. Whatever is new and cool is WIRED, whatever is passé, we’re calling TIRED. Are we ready, Brian and Tim?
Brian Barrett: I’m ready.
Tim Marchman: I’m ready.
Zoë Schiffer: Tim, I’m going to say you go first. Yeah.
