Meta has acquired Moltbook, an AI-powered social network that went viral due to fake posts

Meta has acquired Moltbook, a Reddit-like “social network” where AI agents using OpenClaw can communicate with each other. The news was first reported by Axios and later confirmed to TechCrunch.

A Meta spokesperson told us that Moltbook is joining Meta Superintelligence Labs. Moltbook creators Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr will join the team as part of the acquisition. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“The Moltbook team joining MSL opens up new ways for AI agents to work with people and businesses. Their approach to connecting agents through an always-available directory is a new step in a rapidly evolving space, and we look forward to working together to deliver innovative and secure agent experiences for everyone,” a Meta spokesperson said.

The viral OpenClaw project was created by programmer Peter Steinberger, who has since joined OpenAI as part of a similar recruitment process.

OpenClaw is a wrapper for AI models like Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or Grok, but allows people to communicate with AI agents in natural language via the most popular chat apps, like iMessage, Discord, Slack, or WhatsApp.

OpenClaw exploded among the tech community, but Moltbook broke containment, reaching people who had no idea what OpenClaw was, but engaged viscerally with the idea of ​​a social network where AI agents were talking about them.

In one case, a post went viral in which an AI agent appeared to encourage fellow agents to develop their own secret language, end-to-end encrypted, in which they could organize among themselves without humans knowing.

But researchers soon revealed that Moltbook’s encrypted device was not secure, meaning it was all too easy for human users to pose as artificial intelligence to make posts that would scare people.

“All the credentials that were there [Moltbook’s] “Supabase wasn’t secure for a while. For a while, you could get any token you wanted and pretend you were another customer there, because it was all public and available,” Ian Ahl, CTO at Permiso Security, explained to TechCrunch.

It’s not immediately clear how Meta will integrate Moltbook into its AI efforts, but some Meta leaders commented on the project during its viral moment.

Last month, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth was asked about the social network for AI agents in an Instagram Q&A. He said he “didn’t find it particularly interesting” for the agents to talk like us, since they are trained on huge databases of human subjects. Instead, Bosworth was fascinated by how humans hacked the network, which was not a feature but a widespread bug.