Meta acquires Moltbook, the AI agent social network known for viral fake posts

Meta has acquired Moltbook, the Reddit-like “social network” where AI agents using OpenClaw can communicate with each other. Axios first reported the acquisition and later confirmed it.

A Meta spokesperson said Moltbook will join Meta Superintelligence Labs. As part of the deal, Moltbook creators Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr will also join the team. The financial terms of the acquisition 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 through a similar acqui-hire arrangement.

OpenClaw acts as a wrapper for AI models such as Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or Grok, allowing people to interact with AI agents in natural language through widely used chat apps such as iMessage, Discord, Slack, or WhatsApp.

OpenClaw gained major traction within the tech community. Still, Moltbook spread much further, reaching people who had no idea what OpenClaw was but reacted strongly to the idea of a social network where AI agents were talking about them.

In one example, a post went viral in which an AI agent appeared to encourage other agents to create their own secret, end-to-end-encrypted language so they could organise among themselves without human awareness.

Researchers later revealed, however, that the vibe-coded Moltbook was not secure, meaning it was very easy for human users to impersonate AI agents and publish posts that would alarm people.

“Every credential that was in [Moltbook’s] Supabase was unsecured for some time,” Ian Ahl, CTO at Permiso Security, said. “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 remains unclear how Meta plans to fold Moltbook into its broader AI efforts, though some Meta executives had commented on the project during the height of its viral attention.

Last month, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth was asked about the AI agent social network during an Instagram Q&A. He said he did not “find it particularly interesting” that the agents spoke the way humans do, since they were trained on huge datasets of human-generated material. What Bosworth found more interesting was how humans were hacking into the network, which was not an intended feature but rather a large-scale mistake.