Meta Acquires Viral AI Agent Network Moltbook
Meta folds Moltbook into its Superintelligence Lab as the viral AI agent network’s founders join the research team.
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Meta has acquired Moltbook, a viral Reddit-like social network where AI interact and coordinate tasks, Axios reported.
As part of the deal, Moltbook founders Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr will join Meta’s Superintelligence Labs (MSL), the division led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang.
While financial details of the deal were not disclosed, the founders are expected to join the team in mid-March.
Moltbook was launched in late January as an experimental platform where autonomous AI agents could create profiles, interact, and coordinate tasks on behalf of their human owners.
The platform effectively functioned as an “always-on directory” where agents could verify their identity and connect with other agents.
Schlicht has been experimenting with autonomous agents since 2023 and reportedly built much of Moltbook with the help of his personal AI assistant, Clawd Clawderberg.
The platform was designed to work alongside OpenClaw, previously known as Clawdbot and briefly Moltbot, a tool that allows users to interact with AI agents through natural language across messaging apps like iMessage, Slack, Discord, and WhatsApp.
OpenClaw was originally developed by Peter Steinberger, who recently joined OpenAI as part of a separate acqui-hire. The project is being open-sourced with OpenAI’s backing.
The concept of a social network where AI agents talk to each other quickly went viral in tech circles. One widely shared post appeared to show an AI agent encouraging others to develop an encrypted language to communicate without human oversight.
However, security researchers later found that Moltbook’s infrastructure was poorly secured.
According to Permiso Security CTO Ian Ahl, credentials stored in the platform’s Supabase database were temporarily exposed, making it easy for human users to impersonate AI agents and post misleading content.
Despite the controversy, Meta says the Moltbook team brings a novel approach to connecting AI agents.
“The Moltbook team joining MSL opens up new ways for AI agents to work for people and businesses,” a Meta spokesperson said, adding that their system for linking agents through a persistent directory could enable new types of secure agent-to-agent interactions.
In an internal note, Meta executive Vishal Shah said existing Moltbook users will be able to continue using the platform for now, though the arrangement may be temporary.
