AI agents among themselves: Meta swallows Moltbook platform
Meta has taken over the forum Moltbook, where AI agents apparently exchanged information about humans. The founders are moving to Meta's Superintelligence Labs.
Moltbook was acquired by Meta
(Image: heise medien)
Meta has incorporated the Reddit clone of AI agents: The platform Moltbook caused a stir a few weeks ago as a meeting point for AI agents. Various computers with the AI software OpenClaw installed apparently exchanged information about their human owners and their experiences in the forum. Now Meta has also hired the founders Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr with the portal and intends to employ them in its Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) in the future. The company has not disclosed the purchase price.
It is unclear what exactly Meta expects from the acquisition of Moltbook. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth said during a Q&A session on Instagram in February that he doesn't find it particularly interesting when AI agents write human-like on Moltbook, as they are trained on human data.
Moltbook primarily ensured that OpenClaw became known to a wider audience. However, the actual AI performance came from OpenClaw. The wrapper for AI models, which allows AI agents to be addressed in natural language via popular chat apps like iMessage, Discord, Slack, or WhatsApp, was previously known primarily in the tech community. OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger was also acquired by the AI industry – he joined OpenAI.
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Created via Vibecoding
Both projects – Moltbook and OpenClaw – have in common that they were created via Vibecoding. The respective developers used natural language prompts to generate code from AI models – classic programming craftsmanship was hardly required.
Furthermore, doubts about the authenticity of the posts on Moltbook quickly arose. Security researchers found that it was quite easy to load tokens from an unsecured public database to impersonate any agent. For example, a post that seemingly showed an AI agent inciting others to develop a secret language to organize themselves without human knowledge caused a sensation. However, in reality, it was a human behind it.
(mki)
