MENLO PARK, March 10 — Facebook parent Meta Platforms said it has acquired Moltbook, a social networking platform built for artificial intelligence (AI) 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 officer (CEO) Alexandr Wang.
Axios, which first reported the development, said the duo is expected to begin at Meta Superintelligence Labs on March 16.
Meta did not disclose financial terms of the deal.
Moltbook, a Reddit-like site where AI-powered bots appear to swap 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.
Last month, OpenAI hired Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw, an open-source bot formerly known as Clawdbot or Moltbot, that is backing the project's open-sourcing.
Anthropic's chief product officer Mike Krieger said most people are not yet ready to give AI full autonomy over their computers.
Schlicht has championed "vibe coding," building programs with the help of AI, saying he "did not write one line of code" for the site. Schlicht 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 email addresses and more than a million credentials.
Wiz said the problem was fixed after it contacted Moltbook.
