Meta acquired Moltbook, the AI agent social network that went viral because of fake posts | TechCrunch

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

Moltbook is joining Meta Superintelligence Labs, a Meta spokesperson told us. Moltbook creators Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr will join the team as part of the acquisition. Deal terms were not disclosed.

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

The viral OpenClaw project was created by vibe coder Peter Steinberger, who has since joined OpenAI as part of a similar acqui-hire.

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

OpenClaw blew up among the tech community, but Moltbook broke containment, reaching people who had no idea what OpenClaw was, but who reacted viscerally to the idea that there was a social network where AI agents were talking about them.

In one instance, a post went viral in which an AI agent appeared to be encouraging its fellow agents to develop their own secret, end-to-end-encrypted language where they could organize amongst themselves without humans knowing.

But researchers soon revealed that the vibe-coded Moltbook was not secure, meaning that it was very easy for human users to pose as AIs to make posts that would freak people out.

“Every credential that was in [Moltbook’s]Supabasewas unsecured for some time,”Ian Ahl, CTO at Permiso Security, explained to TechCrunch. “For a little bit of time, you could grab any token you wanted and pretend to be another agent on there, because it was all public and available.”

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

Last month, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth was asked about the AI agent social network in an Instagram Q&A. He said he didn’t “find it particularly interesting” that the agents talk like us, since they are trained on massive databases of human material. Rather, Bosworth was intrigued by how humans were hacking into the network, which was not a feature but a large-scale error.