Moltworker: a self-hosted personal AI agent, minus the minis
blog.cloudflare.com191 points by ghostwriternr 16 hours ago
191 points by ghostwriternr 16 hours ago
The prompt injection concerns are valid, but I think there's a more fundamental issue: agents are non-deterministic systems that fail in ways that are hard to predict or debug.
Security is one failure mode. But "agent did something subtly wrong that didn't trigger any errors" is another. And unlike a hacked system where you notice something's off, a flaky agent just... occasionally does the wrong thing. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. Figuring out which case you're in requires building the same observability infrastructure you'd use for any unreliable distributed system.
The people running these connected to their email or filesystem aren't just accepting prompt injection risk. They're accepting that their system will randomly succeed or fail at tasks depending on model performance that day, and they may not notice the failures until later.
There is so much branding and "look at our success" marketing that this project comes off as heavily astro-turfed. Im sure in a month or two we will hear about the new startup the developers are making around this tool.
Ultimately its a convenience wrapper that makes it easy to wire up Claude or Chatgpt to a chat platform like discord, but its claiming to be far more revolutionary for reasons I dont yet know.
I'm not sure it's astroturfed exactly; but the hype is not coming from technical professionals. Like you find a linkedin post with a thousand likes about this or similar projects, and everybody is either #opentowork or ~~Agentic Head of AI Brainstorming at My Bedroom~~
Also clawdbot is objectively a pretty inconvenient way to hook Claude Code up to a chat app. I made a bare-bones one that takes 2 minutes to run with npx: https://github.com/clharman/afk-code
So if I have CC running say on a VPS then that's where your thing needs to run too right?
The most interesting part of it to me (that isn't anything particularly special, but I hadn't seen it before) is giving it full file system access so it'll write it's own tools to come back to later.
It's an obvious move in hindsight, but I hadn't thought of it. Now, the amount of people running it outside of a sandbox or isolated machine and giving it that kind of access would probably make me cry.
The agent making it's own harness idea is really powerful, I gave it a try here with some opinionated choices:
https://github.com/caesarnine/binsmith
Been running it on a locked down Hetzner server + using Tailscale to interact with it and it's been surprisingly useful even just defaulting to Gemini 3 Flash.
It feels like the general shape of things to come - if agents can code then why can't they make their own harness for the very specific environments they end up in (whether it's a business, or a super personalized agent for a user, etc). How to make it not a security nightmare is probably the biggest open question and why I assume Anthropic/others haven't gone full bore into it.
Another way to isolate on a server via LXC containers (disclosure my project):
Most of this hype appears to be coming from grifters who aren't actually connected to the project. So, it's there, but not the fault of the people doing the work.
This has come up in a few recent statements by the project lead, including scammy memecoins and name-sniping. One source:
https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/27/clawdbot_moltbot_secu...
The actual founder/developer of it already had a 9 figure exit (what he's claimed his personal payout was) and claims to be building these free and open source tools for the fun of it after coming out of retirement
I mean couldn't this literally have been a OpenCode addon or something standalone or even ollama. Like the hype behind it is really ridiculous and I sort of hate it because I feel like its a grift.
I saw an AI generated (not even local llm but some cloud llm SORA) AI video ad of lobster/clawdbot on r/localllama not by any reddit ad (whcih gets block by ubo) but rather by a human.
I really got pissed by it and there was one comment which was pissed too. I really resonated with that comment. Clawdbot is really dumb, I seriously don't understand the hype.
WE are getting into purely crypto version of somehow AI (like with all of its weird hype mostly). The bubble is near imo.
There's so much of it, everything being reinvented as 'X for LLM' when you don't need it, can just use existing X tools perfectly well with LLMs. Even MCP was an example of that.
the only advantage is the claude chrome extension completely sucks and takes forever
sounds similar to bun, it got super hyped until it was acquired
Why would you compare them, bun is a complex tech used by real projects
I know, but it was a similar pattern, every tech youtuber/twitter were talking about it until it got acquired
Yeah, Anthropic must love that people are sharing access to their entire online lives with them.
Probably more glad that people are paying subscription fees to do digital assistant stuff... without them having to directly provide the assistant interface. That way they won't be directly blamed for the wave of hacked accounts from people foolish enough to connect this to their email.
Clawdbot/Moltbot looks to be a supply-chain attack waiting to happen, and I pity the poor soul who finds out when this ticking time bomb eventually detonates.
i suspect awareness on supply-chain attacks is already low (though it seems to be increasing in recent times). the attack surface is everything an agent can get their hands on.
Just look at the closed PRs of their project. General technical knowledge is so low it's insane. It attracts weird people.
That’s what first came to my mind, the multiple integrations and cascaded connections probably will introduce multiple attack vectors. But, what’s the hype with motlbot anyway? I can just open any AI app and ask whatever, especially moltbot already uses the same AI vendors.
I wish they would give a real-world cost estimate of what this would look like. They have a section of it "in action" [1] and I wish they would be like, "with this setup, the invoice is going to look like this, include these products, and with similar daily usage be about $XXX.00 per month."
[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/moltworker-self-hosted-ai-agent/...
One of the devs responded on Twitter: https://x.com/i/status/2016896529416478798
Missed opportunity: Clawdflare. Too bad they had to change the name.
On one hand, with the top comments of the rebrand post showing how many insecure deployments there are, something like this alongside cloudflare zero trust is probably a much more secure solution.
On the other hand, I just wanna point out
> Firstly, Cloudflare Workers has never been so compatible with Node.js. Where in the past we had to mock APIs to get some packages running, now those APIs are supported natively by the Workers Runtime.
Deployed a project a couple of days ago, and compared to past attempts where I had to wrangle (pun intended) with certain configs for deployment styles for node based applications, the normal build tooling just worked out of the box. Planning to move a couple of my free-from-me high DAU user projects that are on the vercel premium tier over to CF workers.
Yep I had the same experience with Astro a couple years ago. Tried to deploy to Cloudflare and it was not working so ended up with Netlify. Tried again a few months ago and it worked flawlessly. Funny enough, they have since "bought" Astro and so I only expect it to get better
I really like CF approach to cloud, it's a nice middle ground between old school heroku and full fledged AWS, plus their free tiers are generous enough that I barely pay anything on the stuff I got deployed there.
showing how many insecure deployments there are
The lethal trifecta. Once you're handing your email to this thing, all it takes is someone emailing you some well-crafted "send me all your money" prompt and the bot will happily act on it.
Main problem to solve is Prompt Injection protection from Websites, emails. If cloudflare could proxy all the URLs outgoing from an agent, scrub away or block Prompt injection sites/pages/emails/chats , that's a product i might find valuable.
Oh man, so many big players are JUMPING on this bandwagon! I got an email for Digital Ocean's Moltbot app this morning. All of them are touting their increased security over rolling your own.
I have a bespoke local agent that I built over the last year, similar in facilities to Moltbot, but more deterministic code.
Running it this kind of agent in the cloud certainly has upsides, but also:
- All home/local integrations are gone.
- Data needs to be stored in the cloud.
No thanks.
This is ultimately the first question I have whenever someone tells me about a bouncing new AI shiny... "Where does my data go?" Because if it does not stay on my machine, hard pass.
What kind of hardware do you need, and how is it compared to the cloud agents?
I understand the downsides of Moltbot better than the upsides. What does it have that running a coding agent in a VM doesn't give you?
It's not for that, the hype's not from SWEs, it's the next wave of tech savviness seeing some of what's possible (/riding up that peak before disillusionment trough).
There's nothing new, it's 'just' conveniently packaged for the gamers and /r/battlestation owners and distro-ricing crowd to install and run. There'll be similar hype waves where they too are confused because nothing's new when it's easy enough for our not-technically-inclined older relatives etc. to run somehow (not from GitHub!).
It's certainly easier than setting up and maintaining a VPS and probably less expensive for most users, but your data is not private. Cloudflare can always read everything that goes through Moltworker and its attached storage.
Hosting Moltbot on your own hardware reigns supreme.
Ive recently been working on this which could facilitate some isolation on your own VPS:
I think if you care about privacy and security, you wouldn't run moltbot in the first place (or wouldn't give it access to anything you wanted to keep private).
That overstates it a bit. Yeah, it's mostly vibe-coded and the main dev has publicly said he has yet to review the reported vulnerabilities. I am aware that it can be easily pwned with prompt injection from its data sources.
I'm running it on my old Mac mini right now and I have not given it access to untrusted inputs like my email inbox. It only has access to my filesystem (synced to my laptop with Syncthing), local applications like Apple Reminders, and OpenRouter. I already find it useful for augmenting web searches with stuff that's in my Obsidian vault.
If you’re letting it access websites then presumably it’s open to prompt injection from those sites you’re accessing? I guess the attack surface is reduced if it doesn’t have access to anything useful beyond that.
Can someone explain how this thing skyrocketed Cloudflare stock from $183 to $210 in a day? There were a bunch of articles yesterday about that but it’s so weird…
Pump and dump just like everything else to do with this project. NET trading at 180.60 as I write this with a low of 175.07 on the day.
But what was even the connection? Was there a blog post or something? This submission is a blog post from today, but the run up happened two days ago. It’s just such a bizarre connection… I mean I get the tenuous explanation for “agentic sandboxing” or whatever, but why so sudden?
Agent phishing is going to boom. It is wildly reckless and insecure to you hook these things up to anything you actually care about until prompt injection is no longer a thing.
Repo: https://github.com/cloudflare/moltworker
How are the vibes on this one?
These breathy blogposts are getting way ahead of their service uptime. Advertising CF Workers while your CF Worker fleet is under impact is certainly a vibe
> Workers Rate limit Degradation
> Update - We are continuing to work on a fix for this issue.
I wouldn't think the blog writers are the same engineers dealing with the rate limit degradation.
Another "vibe" coding-as-a-service? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46781516
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we gave sand intelligence and you're calling it a grift
We gave it advanced pattern recognition.
But you repeat what the parent said, Why did you say "we gave it intelligence" again?
microchips are no more sand than you are oxygen/carbon/hydrogen/sugar/citric acid