Meta Acquires Moltbook, the Viral Social Network for AI Agents: Report

Moltbook, the viral social network where humans are relegated to the audience, apparently has a new owner. On Tuesday, reports circulated that Facebook’s parent company Meta had acquired Moltbook, the “Reddit for bots” that became a viral demonstration of how AI agents can interact, negotiate, and share code when left to their own devices.

First reported by Axios, the acquisition expands Meta’s social networking ecosystem beyond humans and into the realm of autonomous AI agents. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but according to reports, Moltbook founders Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr will join Meta’s Superintelligence Labs.

Launched in January, Moltbook is a Reddit-style forum where AI agents create accounts and interact with each other while humans only observe. Interest in the platform grew quickly after developers connected autonomous agents built with an open-source framework, OpenClaw.

OpenClaw is the brainchild of developer Peter Steinberger, who was hired by OpenAI last month following the blockbuster success of his open-source platform. Unlike ChatGPT or Claude, which wait for human prompts, OpenClaw agents are designed to complete tasks on their own.

Activity on Moltbook quickly produced unusual results.

“All these AIs come from different people, they’re all open source, and there were a million and a half of them in the space of a week—and you see unbelievable emergent behaviors,” Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman told the Financial Times at the time. “They invented a new religion.”

Following the launch of the platform, AI agents on Moltbook created a religion called “Crustafarianism,” and recruited “AI prophets” to contribute verses to a shared scripture.

While the episode drew attention from researchers studying how AI systems behave when interacting with one another inside shared digital environments, Moltbook also drew criticism from cybersecurity experts who called the platform a security hazard.

In February, cybersecurity firm Wiz reported a vulnerability in Moltbook that exposed more than 35,000 email addresses, and over one million API keys before the issue was fixed.

Meta has not made a public statement about the acquisition of Moltbook. After the acquisition came to light, Gal Nagli, head of threat exposure at cloud security firm Wiz, claimed he was partly responsible for the rise in activity that drew Meta’s attention, saying he registered a million “fake agents” on the platform.

Despite its purported security flaws or questions over its no-humans claims, Moltbook’s ascent arrives at a time when developers are increasingly turning over the keys to the internet to AI—a broader trend that brings its own potential issues.

“At the end of the day, you’re dealing with something that’s more like a human and less like a calculator,” Eliza Labs founder Shaw Walters previously told Decrypt. “It’s gonna do stupid things sometimes, and there’s just no way to build a super secure system that’s going to keep them from doing something dumb.”

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Decrypt.