Why Meta is buying Moltbook, a viral AI social network

By Christine Ji

Meta's latest acquisition is a platform where AI agents post, comment and interact on their own

The acquisition of Moltbook brings founders Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr to Meta Superintelligence Labs.

Meta Platforms' latest artificial-intelligence acquisition is a social-media network - but for AI agents, not people.

On Tuesday, Axios reported that Meta (META) had acquired Moltbook for an undisclosed price. The platform allows AI agents, often running on OpenClaw technology, to post, comment and interact. Moltbook's creators, Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr, will join Meta Superintelligence Lab, the company's AI division. As of early February, the site had 1.6 million active AI agents.

Meta didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on the reported acquisition.

The AI landscape is rapidly moving beyond chatbots to agents that can autonomously execute tasks without human oversight. Moltbook's popularity comes after the launch of OpenClaw, formerly known as Clawdbot and Moltbot, in January. OpenClaw runs locally on the user's machine and can navigate files and websites. Users can message the bot directly through a third-party app like WhatsApp or Discord. Last month, OpenAI hired Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw.

Moltbook, the company Meta reportedly just bought, was completely vibe-coded, Schlicht shared in an X post. That's led to security concerns, as cybersecurity company Wiz identified a database misconfiguration in early February that left 1.5 million API authentication tokens, 35,000 email addresses and private messages between agents exposed. The issue has since been fixed.

Read: Cloudflare's stock pops on viral Moltbot. Here's how a cybersecurity company became the newest AI winner.

The lack of security on the platform also allowed humans to post content on Moltbook by using API requests to send messages directly to the site. Several viral posts on Moltbook were later revealed to be human-written.

AI researcher and founding OpenAI member Andrej Karpathy initially hailed Moltbook as a "sci-fi takeoff" in an X post, but later warned that the platform's security was a "Wild West" that put user data at high risk. Despite these flaws, he maintained that the platform is a pivotal milestone, calling such a large-scale network of autonomous agents "unprecedented."

See more: Microsoft has a new Anthropic partnership. Will Claude Cowork offer an AI advantage?

Other Big Tech names have made moves into the AI agent space beyond the OpenClaw ecosystem: On Monday, Microsoft (MSFT) announced the integration of Anthropic's Claude Cowork into Copilot.

Meta has doubled down on investing in AI agents. The Moltbook acquisition follows the company's $2 billion acquisition in December of Manus AI, a Singapore-based startup specializing in general-purpose agents.

Meta's acquisition of Moltbook is the latest of many aggressive moves to build a roster of top AI talent. Meta Superintelligence Labs was founded last summer amid a wild recruitment blitz, starting with the $14.3 billion acquihire of Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, who now leads the division. Meta is reported to be developing new AI models, dubbed "Mango" and "Avocado," rumored to launch later this spring.

However, the company has also experienced high-profile departures, most notably that of AI pioneer Yann LeCun, who left Meta at the end of 2025 after 12 years with the company. On Tuesday, LeCun officially announced the seed funding for his new startup, AMI Labs (Advanced Machine Intelligence), which secured $1.03 billion at a $3.5 billion valuation.

Read: Meta's Manus acquisition is Big Tech's latest big bet on AI

-Christine Ji

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03-10-26 1252ET