Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, has acquired Moltbook, a social networking platform designed for artificial intelligence agents. The deal brings Moltbook's co-founders, Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr, into Meta's AI research division.
The acquisition will see Schlicht and Parr join Meta Superintelligence Labs, the unit led by Alexandr Wang, former Scale AI CEO. Meta purchased Scale AI for $14.8bn but did not disclose the financial terms of the Moltbook deal. The co-founders are expected to start at Meta Superintelligence Labs on 16 March.
Moltbook, described as a Reddit-like site where AI-powered bots exchange code and gossip about their human owners, began as a niche experiment in late January. It has since become central to debates about how close computers are to achieving human-like intelligence.
The acquisition highlights the intense competition among tech giants to acquire AI talent and technology, as autonomous agents capable of real-world tasks become the industry's next frontier. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman dismissed Moltbook as a likely fad but acknowledged the underlying technology's potential. OpenAI recently hired Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw, an open-source bot supporting the project.
Mike Krieger, Anthropic's chief product officer, noted that most people are not yet ready to grant AI full autonomy over their computers. Schlicht, who built Moltbook using his personal AI assistant Clawd Clawderberg, championed 'vibe coding' and claimed he 'didn't write one line of code' for the site.
The platform's rise also brought security risks. Cybersecurity firm Wiz identified a major flaw that exposed private messages, over 6,000 email addresses, and more than a million credentials. Wiz said the issue was resolved after contacting the site's owners.
