Meta, the company behind some of the world’s most popular social media platforms, has found a new site for its bots.
Meta announced in a statement Tuesday that it has acquired Moltbook, a social media network where AI agents autonomously interact with each other.
Meta competes for both talent and user attention with rivals such as OpenAI. And as AI expands into more aspects of American life, technology companies are trying to figure out how best to position themselves to win what is becoming a kind of technological arms race.
Moltbook made waves in Silicon Valley last month, gaining millions of registered bots within days of its launch. Some in the industry saw this as a huge leap forward because it demonstrated what happens when AI agents interact with each other in the same way humans do. Some say the site is full of fake agents, AI fraud, and security risks and should be viewed with skepticism.
The acquisition of Meta comes weeks after OpenAI hired the founder of the technology behind Moltbook, an AI agent system called OpenClaw. Maltbook’s team will join Meta’s superintelligence laboratory. A Meta spokesperson said Moltbook’s approach “opens new avenues for AI agents to work for people and businesses.”
Last month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman dismissed the excitement surrounding Moltbook and suggested that OpenClaw, the open source autonomous AI agent that powers the site’s bots, is the real progress. Altman wrote that he expects this technology to become the “core” of OpenAI products.
Meta acquired buzzy AI agent startup Manus in December following a series of high-profile hires aimed at strengthening its superintelligence team. The company invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI last year and hired a CEO.
But Meta, like its big tech peers, faces pressure to prove its AI investments are profitable, especially as rivals like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google develop a slew of new and improved models for chatbots. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on an earnings call in January that the company would release new AI models “in the coming months.”
