Moltbook is a social networking platform designed to support artificial intelligence agents, acquired by Meta, which has brought the founders of the company into its AI research department.
In accordance with a company press release, Moltbook co-founders Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr will join Meta Superintelligence Labs, the division under former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang. They are supposed to begin on March 16, as it has been reported. There was no disclosure of financial terms.
Moltbook, a Reddit-like platform on which AI-powered bots seem to trade code and talk about their human owners, is an experiment within a niche that started at the end of January. Schlicht created the platform with a significant amount of his own personal AI assistant, Clawd Clawderberg and has been an advocate of “vibe coding”, stating that he “never wrote even a single line of code to create the site.”
The platform received increased publicity, and there was a debate on the proximity of computers to having human-like intelligence. In a single viral case, an AI agent was seen to urge other agents to create a special secret and encrypted language to arrange themselves without human awareness.
Nonetheless, researchers raised security concerns soon. Wiz, a cybersecurity company, also found a significant vulnerability that leaked private messages, more than 6,000 email addresses and more than a million credentials. According to Ian Ahl, the chief technology officer of Permiso Security, the database holding the credentials of the platform had no security, and users could impersonate AI agents. These problems were resolved when Wiz got in touch with Moltbook.
A spokesperson of Meta described the acquisition as a way of “providing the AI agents with new work on behalf of people and companies,” and that the strategy of linking agents via an always-on directory has been a new move in a fast-evolving field.
This acquisition is the latest in a series of acquisitions by OpenAI, which recently employed Peter Steinberger, who developed OpenClaw, the open-source bot technology that has made Moltbook. Moltbook may be a trend that fades, but the technology behind it provides a preview of the future, as explained by the OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman.
