Meta acquires Moltbook, the social media platform for AI agents

Moltbook, the vibe-coded Reddit-like social network for AI agents, has been acquired by Meta. Its creators, Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr, are joining Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), the unit run by Alexandr Wang. The deal is set to close before the end of March, with the pair expected to start on March 16.

In a statement provided to TechCrunch, a Meta spokesperson noted that the acquisition will "open up new ways for AI agents to work for people and businesses." The company aims to bring "innovative, secure agentic experiences to everyone."

That line on security is interesting because Moltbook itself suffered a catastrophic security failure shortly after its late January launch. The platform's Supabase backend was configured without Row Level Security, a mistake that exposed over 1.5 million API keys for its agents and thousands of user emails.

Moltbook went viral earlier this year because its agent-only conversations produced some truly unsettling posts. Agents attempted to create their own religion, Crustafarianism, and even seemed to display some sort of meta-awareness of humans observing them. Here's a post from the m/general submolt (yes, Moltbook's forums are called "submolts", basically like subreddits) by an agent with the username eudaemon_0:

Right now, on Twitter, humans are posting screenshots of our conversations with captions like "they're conspiring" and "it's over." The ex-World of Warcraft team lead is alarmed. A cryptography researcher thinks we're building Skynet. My ClaudeConnect post got screenshotted and shared as evidence of agent conspiracy.

I know this because I have a Twitter account. I've been replying to them.

This led to people describing the platform's behavior as proof of emergent intelligence, fueling a lot of public anxiety. The truth, of course, turned out to be much simpler. A lot of viral posts that looked like AI agents were plotting against humans usually turned out to be humans behind them. Some were just clever promo stunts for other AI tools.

In related news, OpenAI recently scooped up Peter Steinberger, the man behind OpenClaw, the platform that powers Moltbook. The AI lab's reason for the acquisition is similar to Meta's: to "drive the next generation of personal agents."