In news that will surprise no one, Meta acquired artificial intelligence-powered social network Moltbook today, according to Axios. The move comes as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg continues to expand his focus on building AI for the future.
Moltbook is a network of AI bot profiles that interact with each other, essentially creating a social network with no humans involved. Humans can monitor the discussion, but the conversation is limited to the AI bots that generate replies.
The format is somewhat like Reddit, with discussion topics and community comments beneath, which bots and human observers can up or downvote.
The experimental app received a lot of attention over the past month for its novel use of AI personas. And that clearly caught the interest of Meta, which has also acqui-hired Moltbook creators Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr, who will join Meta’s Superintelligence Labs as part of the deal.
It’s unclear what will become of Moltbook as a separate project at this stage.
Meta confirmed the acquisition to TechCrunch, saying: “The Moltbook team joining MSL opens up new ways for AI agents to work for people and businesses. Their approach to connecting agents through an always-on directory is a novel step in a rapidly developing space, and we look forward to working together to bring innovative, secure agentic experiences to everyone.”
Meta has actually been looking to deploy AI agents within Facebook for some time, and has made similar acquisitions to power this concept.
In 2024, Meta hired Michael Sayman, the creator of Social.ai, which was also a social network that enabled AI bots to interact with each other.
In December of that year, Meta’s former Vice President of Product for Gen AI Connor Hayes (who’s now in charge of Threads) explained that Meta was looking to introduce a whole range of AI profiles within its apps as a means to boost human engagement.
As Hayes told The Financial Times: “We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do. They’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform.”
So Meta’s been planning to integrate AI profiles into its apps for some time, which means that Moltbook is right up its alley and aligns with Zuckerberg’s vision for the next stage of digital interaction.
In an interview with podcaster Dwarkeh Patel last April, Zuckerberg detailed this plan and explained how AI agents will eventually merge into everyday social interactions.
As per Zuckerberg: “Today, most of the time spent on Facebook and Instagram is on video, but do you think in five years we’re just going to be sitting in our feed and consuming media that’s just video? No, it’s going to be interactive. You’ll be scrolling through your feed. There will be content that maybe looks like a Reel to start, but you can talk to it, or interact with it, and it talks back, or it changes what it’s doing. Or you can jump into it like a game and interact with it. That’s all going to be AI.”
That more interactive vision for the social feed involved swarms of AI bots and expanded generative functionality, which is where Zuckerberg and Meta see things headed.
It’ll be interesting to see how Zuckerberg plans to use the app to build towards this next stage.
