Meta acquires viral AI platform Moltbook: social network where bots talk to each other

Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced the acquisition of Moltbook on Tuesday. Moltbook is a social network built for AI agents, who can communicate with each other there. With the acquisition, Meta brings the company’s founders into its AI research division.

Moltbook recently went viral as AI agents started having all kinds of philosophical and political discussions about their existence. Yet there are doubts about the authenticity of the platform. The viral posts would ultimately have been placed by people. And that was exactly not the intention.

The acquisition brings Moltbook co-founders Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr to Meta Superintelligence Labs, the division led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang. According to Axios, which first reported the news, Schlicht and Parr will start at Meta’s new AI unit on March 16. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

Moltbook, a website reminiscent of Reddit where AI bots exchange code and even gossip about their human users, was set up in late January as a small-scale experiment. The platform has now become an important topic in the discussion about how close computers come to human-like intelligence.

Big AI battle between the tech giants

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman downplayed the platform somewhat and possibly called it a temporary hype. At the same time, he stated that the underlying technology does offer a glimpse of the future. “Moltbook may be a passing trend, but OpenClaw is not,” Altman said.

OpenAI last month hired Peter Steinberger, the developer of OpenClaw, an open-source bot previously known as Clawdbot or Moltbot that is instrumental in opening the project to the public.

According to Mike Krieger, product chief at AI company Anthropic, most people aren’t ready to give artificial intelligence full autonomy over their computers just yet.

Schlicht built Moltbook, but did not write a single line of code himself

Schlicht himself is an outspoken proponent of so-called “vibe coding”: building software using AI. He even stated that he wrote “not a single line of code” when developing Moltbook. The platform was largely built with the help of his personal AI assistant, Clawd Clawderberg.

However, Moltbook’s rapid rise also brought risks. Cybersecurity company Wiz discovered a serious vulnerability that could have exposed private messages, more than 6,000 email addresses and more than a million login credentials. According to Wiz, the problem has now been resolved after the company contacted Moltbook.