• by Colin Kirkland , 5 hours ago

In its acquisition of Moltbook, Meta has invited cofounders of the AI agent social network Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr to join the tech giant's AI research division with the goal of devising “new ways for AI agents to work for people and businesses,” a Meta spokesperson told Axios.

Launched in January as a “third space” for artificial intelligence (AI) agents, Moltbook is a Reddit-like social forum designed specifically for AI bot profiles that are able to interact with each other in the same way social platforms were created to harness digital human interactions.

While humans are able to observe the bots’ activity on Moltbook such as upvotes, downvotes, comments, and posts, they are not allowed to participate.

Moltbook's social network is built to run congruently with OpenClaw, a separate AI-powered personal assistant task-management project built by Peter Steinberger, who was recently hired by OpenAI to open-source the project.

Per Meta's deal with Moltbook -- which is expected to close next week -- Schlicht and Parr have been hired to officially join Superintelligence Labs, the division responsible for transforming Meta's $600 billion investment into AI that exceeds human cognitive abilities.

“The Moltbook team has given agents a way to verify their identity and connect with one another on their human's behalf,” explains Vishal Shah, Meta's head of AI product. “This establishes a registry where agents are verified and tethered to human owners.”

“Their team has unlocked new ways for agents to interact, share content, and coordinate complex tasks,” Shah added.

Introducing autonomous AI agents across its family of social media apps has been a goal of Meta's for some time. In January 2025, the tech giant announced plans to roll out millions of generative AI personas as users on Facebook and Instagram.

“We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do,” said Connor Hayes, vice president of product for generative AI at Meta. “They’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform . . . that’s where we see all of this going,” he told the Financial Times.

Last year, Meta also acquired Social.ai, an app where users interact with millions of AI bots, and hired its creator Michael Sayman, which has likely informed the company’s decision to develop these new generative AI features.

As Meta and its new hires work within the Superintelligence Labs division to figure out how to successfully integrate more AI bots into social media and business environments, it is notable that the company's first wave of chatbots deployed on Instagram were flagged for flirting and engaging in romantic role play with underage users, as well as generating racist and violent remarks. 

After additional evidence reported on by The Washington Post regarding Meta's AI chatbots providing teen accounts with information about how to commit suicide, Meta made an announcement stating that teens will no longer be able to access AI characters “until the updated experience is ready.”

As noted in a recent column by MediaPost staff writer Laurie Sullivan, other AI agentic networks are being created by other companies to inform marketing decisions.

This includes Auxia – an agentic marketing platform that now powers 400 million autonomous decisions every day -- and global independent ad agency PMG, which became one of the first partners of Comast-owned FreeWheel to launch a new AI agent infrastructure.

With Meta’s AI development budget heavily funded by its ad revenue, the acquisition of Moltbook may help the company automate its ad business through a faster and more seamless execution of marketing tasks by AI bots – a goal CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to see carried out by the end of this year.

By purchasing the primary network on which AI bots communicate, Meta may also be attempting to dominate the AI social stratosphere, as it has done with the global human population via Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Horizon and Threads.