Facebook's parent company - Meta Platforms announced that it has acquired Moltbook, a social networking platform built for artificial intelligence (AI) agents.
This agreement also brought Moltbook's founders to Meta's AI research division.
According to an announcement on March 11 (local time), two co-founders of Moltbook, Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr, will join Meta Superintelligence Labs, an AI research unit led by Alexandr Wang, former CEO of Scale AI.
According to the US online news site - Axios, the two founders are expected to start working at Meta from March 16. The financial terms of the deal are not disclosed.
Moltbook is built as a website with a similar structure to Reddit, where AI bots can post content, exchange source code and discuss their tasks.
This platform was launched as a small test at the end of January but quickly attracted attention in the technology community.
The emergence of Moltbook has sparked much debate about the level of AI's approach to human-like intelligence, as bots can interact and share information with each other on a separate social platform.
However, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes that Moltbook may just be a temporary trend. However, he believes that the project's platform technology still provides a vision of the future of automated AI systems.
Altman also emphasized that technologies related to OpenClaw (an open source AI project) are truly an important step in developing AI agents capable of operating independently.
This deal reflects the increasingly fierce competition between technology corporations to attract talent and AI technology. As automated AI systems develop, owning research teams and advanced tools is considered a key factor.
Previously, Peter Steinberger, developer of OpenClaw, was also recruited by OpenAI to support the project transition to open source.
Meanwhile, Mike Krieger, Product Director of Anthropic, said that most users are still not ready to give full control of computers to AI systems.
The rapid development of Moltbook also comes with some risks. Network security company Wiz (headquartered in New York) said that the platform once had a security vulnerability that exposed private messages, more than 6,000 email addresses and more than one million login information. According to Wiz, the problem was fixed after they contacted the Moltbook development team.
Notably, Mr. Schlicht said he built most of Moltbook with the support of a personal AI assistant named Clawd Clawderberg and almost did not have to write the code himself.
The acquisition of Moltbook shows that Meta is continuing to accelerate investment in artificial intelligence, in the context of global technology corporations promoting research on AI systems capable of automatically performing tasks in the real world.
