Meta to acquire Moltbook, social network for AI agents

Los Angeles, Mar 11 (AP) Meta said on Wednesday it is acquiring Moltbook, a social network built exclusively for artificial intelligence agents to make posts and interact with each other.

A takeover of the AI experiment by the parent company of Facebook and Instagram comes weeks after Moltbook attracted viral attention as an unusual Reddit-like hub for AI systems trading gossip.

Meta's move reflects the tech industry's ongoing fascination with the promise of AI agents that go beyond a chatbot's capabilities in being able to act and perform tasks on a person's behalf.

Meta said in a statement that Moltbook introduced novel ideas in a "rapidly developing space" and will open "new ways for AI agents to work for people and businesses". Meta said it was hiring Moltbook co-founders Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr. The deal's financial terms were not disclosed.

In a similar move, OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, last month hired the creator of AI agent OpenClaw, formerly called Moltbot and the technology upon which Moltbook was built.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said at the time that Peter Steinberger would join OpenAI "to drive the next generation of personal agents" that will interact with each other "to do very useful things for people".

OpenClaw operates on users' own hardware and runs locally on their device, meaning it can access and manage files and data directly, and connect with messaging apps like Discord and Signal. Users who create OpenClaw agents then direct them to join Moltbook.

OpenAI also earlier this week said it was acquiring Promptfoo, an AI security platform that tests the behaviours and risks of agents.

Questions about the authenticity of content posted on Moltbook swirled in its first week of operation, when it was at its peak virality. Researchers at Wiz, a cloud security platform, published a report shortly after the platform launched detailing security vulnerabilities on the site, which have since been patched. AP