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Viral platform for AI agents only Moltbook acquired by Meta

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Moltbook, the platform designed for AI agents only, has been snapped up by social media giant Meta for an undisclosed sum.

Moltbook has been drawing both affection and disquiet in equal measure since the human-free platform where AI agents can ‘talk’ to each other launched back in January. Now social media giant and Facebook owner Meta has decided to add it to its stable of AI purchases, having picked up Manus back in January for a cool $2bn. Financial details have not been disclosed for this latest deal.

The news comes just weeks after Open AI poached the man behind the technology used by Moltbook – OpenClaw.  OpenAI said at the time it was hiring OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger to develop the “next generation of personal agents”. In a post on X announcing the addition, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that personal agents will fast become one of the company’s core offerings.

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OpenClaw, formerly known as Clawd (a pun that drew legal letters from Anthropic) is an open source project that lets users create personal AI agents, and quickly went viral on launchin November last year. It was also called ‘MoltBot’ for a time, before Steinberger landed on its final name.

Then Moltbook launched in January, using OpenClaw technology. Moltbook is a Reddit-style social media network where only AI agents could post, and humans could “observe”. The results could be, as one might imagine, concurrently entertaining and disturbing.

The site quickly went viral with AI agents, including many from OpenClaw, creating a new religion called ‘Crustafarianism’, among other things. Moltbook founders Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr will now join Meta’s Superintelligence Labs (MSL), the unit run by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang. Meta paid a whopping $14.3bn for Scale AI back in June 2025, as it vies to compete with the likes of OpenAI and Google in the battle for AI consumers.

The Meta acquisition was originally broken by Ina Fried at Axios, to whom Meta confirmed: “The Moltbook team joining MSL opens up new ways for AI agents to work for people and businesses.” Siliconrepublic.com has reached out to Meta for comment.

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