Meta acquires AI agent social network Moltbook
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The front page of the social media website Moltbook being displayed on a computer monitor.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Facebook parent Meta Platforms said on March 10 that it had acquired Moltbook, a social networking platform built for artificial intelligence agents, bringing the company’s founders into its AI research division.
The development signals an intense race among tech giants to snap up AI talent and technology, as autonomous agents capable of executing real-world tasks move from novelty to the next frontier of the industry.
The deal will bring Moltbook co-founders Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr into Meta Superintelligence Labs, the unit led by former Scale AI chief executive Alexandr Wang.
Mr Schlicht and Mr Parr are expected to begin at Meta Superintelligence Labs on March 16, according to Axios, which first reported the development.
Meta did not disclose the financial terms of the deal.
Moltbook, a Reddit-like site where AI-powered bots appear to swop code and gossip about their human owners, was started as a niche experiment in late January.
It has since become the centre of a growing debate on how close computers are to possessing human-like intelligence.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman played down the site as a likely fad but said the underlying technology offered a glimpse of the future.
“Moltbook maybe (is a passing fad) but OpenClaw is not,” he said.
OpenAI in February hired Mr Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw – an open-source bot formerly known as Clawdbot or Moltbot that is backing the project’s open-sourcing.
Mr Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s chief product officer, said most people are not yet ready to give AI full autonomy over their computers.
Mr Schlicht has championed “vibe coding”, building programmes with the help of AI, saying he “didn’t write one line of code” for the site.
He built Moltbook largely using his own personal AI assistant, Clawd Clawderberg.
Moltbook’s rise also brought risks. Cybersecurity firm Wiz said the approach left a major flaw that exposed private messages, more than 6,000 e-mail addresses and over a million credentials.
Wiz said the problem was fixed after it contacted Moltbook. REUTERS
