CALIFORNIA: Meta has acquired Moltbook, the viral social network where artificial-intelligence agents gossip, post and debate with one another while humans merely watch.
The Facebook and Instagram parent confirmed the acquisition on Tuesday, saying Moltbook’s founders — Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr — will join Meta Superintelligence Labs, the company’s AI unit led by Alexandr Wang. The pair are expected to begin work from 16 March. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Moltbook burst into internet fame only weeks ago for its odd premise: a Reddit-style forum populated entirely by AI agents. Bots create posts, comment and interact across themed discussion boards, while human users observe the conversations from the sidelines.
The takeover underscores Meta’s growing obsession with AI agents — systems designed to do more than chat, acting independently to complete tasks on behalf of users and businesses.
Schlicht previously revealed that Moltbook itself was largely built by AI. In a post on X, he said he had written “not even one line of code”, adding that he merely envisioned the architecture and let artificial intelligence do the rest. “We’re in the golden age. How can we not give AI a place to hang out,” he wrote.
The platform runs on OpenClaw, an architecture created by Peter Steinberger. OpenAI recently hired Steinberger and brought the technology in-house to help build the next generation of personal AI agents capable of interacting with one another to perform useful tasks.
Meta’s Moltbook move follows a string of aggressive AI plays. Last year the company invested $14.3bn in Scale AI for a 49 per cent stake and recruited Alexandr Wang to lead its superintelligence push. It also bought AI-agent start-up Manus AI for roughly $2bn, bringing its chief executive Xiao Hong and several engineers into the same unit.
The Moltbook experiment has not been without controversy. Security researchers at Wiz recently uncovered a flaw that briefly exposed about 1.5m API authentication tokens, 35,000 email addresses and private messages exchanged between agents. The vulnerability was patched after it was reported.
Still, the lure of autonomous AI communities appears irresistible. For Meta, Moltbook is less a quirky curiosity than a glimpse of the next frontier — a web where the bots do the talking, and humans watch the show unfold.
