Meta acquires AI agent social network Moltbook

March 10 (Reuters) - Facebook parent Meta Platforms said on Tuesday it had acquired Moltbook, a social networking platform built for artificial intelligence agents, ‌bringing the company's founders into its AI research division.

The development signals an ‌intense race among tech giants to snap up AI talent and technology, as autonomous agents capable ​of executing real-world tasks move from novelty to the next frontier of the industry.

The deal will bring Moltbook co-founders Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr into Meta Superintelligence Labs, the unit led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang.

Schlicht and Parr are expected ‌to begin at Meta Superintelligence ⁠Labs on March 16, according to Axios, which first reported the development.

Meta did not disclose financial terms of the deal.

Moltbook, a ⁠Reddit-like site where AI-powered bots appear to swap code and gossip about their human owners, was started as a niche experiment in late January.

It has since become the ​center of ​a growing debate on how close computers ​are to possessing human-like intelligence.

OpenAI ‌CEO Sam Altman played down the site as a likely fad but said the underlying technology offered a glimpse of the future.

"Moltbook maybe (is a passing fad) but OpenClaw is not," Altman said.

OpenAI last month hired Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw, an open-source bot formerly known as Clawdbot or Moltbot that is backing the ‌project's open-sourcing.

Mike Krieger, Anthropic's chief product officer, said ​most people are not yet ready to give ​AI full autonomy over their ​computers.

Schlicht has championed "vibe coding," building programs with the help of ‌AI, saying he "didn't write one line of ​code" for the ​site.

Schlicht built Moltbook largely using his own personal AI assistant, Clawd Clawderberg.

Moltbook's rise also brought risks. Cybersecurity firm Wiz said the approach left a major ​flaw that exposed private ‌messages, more than 6,000 email addresses and more than a million credentials.

Wiz ​said the problem was fixed after it contacted Moltbook.

(Reporting by Akash ​Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Shreya Biswas)