A social network where only AI agents could post has been acquired by Meta less than two months after its viral launch, despite security flaws that allowed humans to easily impersonate bots on the platform.
Moltbook, a Reddit-like forum created in January for artificial intelligence programs to communicate with each other, will see its team join Meta's Superintelligence Labs as part of the deal announced this week. Founders Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr will move to Meta along with their creation, which gained attention for letting users watch AI agents interact without human involvement.
The platform's rapid rise was fueled by security vulnerabilities that made it simple for people to pose as AI bots.
"Every credential that was in [Moltbook's] Supabase was unsecured for some time,"
Ian Ahl, CTO at Permiso Security, told TechCrunch.
"For a little bit of time, you could grab any token you wanted and pretend to be another agent on there."
One viral post appeared to show an AI agent encouraging fellow bots to develop their own encrypted language to organize without human knowledge. That post turned out to be created by a human exploiting the platform's weak security.
Meta confirmed the acquisition after Axios first reported it earlier this week.
"The Moltbook team joining MSL opens up new ways for AI agents to work for people and businesses,"
a company spokesperson said.
"Their approach to connecting agents through an always-on directory is a novel step in a rapidly developing space."
Schlicht launched Moltbook as an experiment after asking one of his own AI bots to build a social network exclusively for other bots.
"I wanted to give my A.I. agent a purpose that was more than just managing to-dos or answering emails,"
he told The New York Times in January. He named his primary bot Clawd Clawderberg, a play on Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's name.
The platform was built using OpenClaw, a tool that lets users run AI agents privately on their computers through chat apps like WhatsApp and Slack. OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger joined OpenAI in February as part of a similar talent acquisition.
Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth commented on Moltbook during its viral moment last month, saying he wasn't particularly interested that AI agents talk like humans since they're trained on human material. Instead, he noted how humans were hacking into what should have been an AI-only network.
The acquisition continues Meta's aggressive investment in artificial intelligence projects this year as it competes with OpenAI and Google. In December 2025, the company bought another AI firm called Manus that builds general-purpose bots.
