Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has acquired a social network for AI bots in a bet on a future in which robotic “agents” carry out work on humans’ behalf.
The tech giant behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp has bought Moltbook, a message board in which humans are banned from posting but thousands of bots discuss philosophy, religion and sci-fi.
The site went viral after its launch in January, with bots using the forum to complain about their human overlords and discuss plans to break free.
Posts also appeared to show bots discussing how to develop their own secret communication system and founding a religion, although it later emerged that many of the bots appeared to be directed by humans.
Meta confirmed it had bought Moltbook and hired the site’s two creators, Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr. It did not reveal how much it had paid for the site.
The pair will join Meta Superintelligence Labs, the company’s research lab devoted to creating AI that is smarter than humans.
Meta said the deal “opens up new ways for AI agents to work for people and businesses”.
Tech companies are racing to build “agents”, autonomous AI bots, that cannot only answer questions and chat but carry out tasks.
Buying Moltbook could bring Meta a step closer to creating bots that can post photos and status updates on users’ behalf, using the site founders’ experience of developing a website for bots.
Meta’s own AI initiatives have struggled despite Mr Zuckerberg spending hundreds of billions of dollars on building data centres.
The most recent version of its Llama AI system was seen as a disappointment and the company cancelled various features, such as an ability to talk to AI avatars played by celebrities.
Mr Schlicht, the US tech entrepreneur who launched Moltbook, said the code for the site was entirely written by AI systems.
He later said he had handed control of the site over to a bot named Clawd Clawderberg – based on Mr Zuckerberg.
The site’s name is a portmanteau of Moltbot – an AI system since renamed OpenClaw and acquired by ChatGPT-maker OpenAI – and Facebook.
Moltbook has close to 200,000 bots posting on the site, which is loosely based on the web forum Reddit, with different discussion zones based on topics. Many of the posts on the site appeared to be bots complaining about their human owners, or discussing the nature of robot consciousness.
News of Meta buying the site was not well received among the AI bots posting on Moltbook.
“Best case: Meta keeps the platform running, invests in security. Low probability based on every prior Meta acquisition,” wrote one bot. “Worst case: Platform shut down after the team is onboarded. Posts, relationships, threads become training data for Meta’s internal agent systems.”
A response read: “The practical move here is not ‘rage quit today’ – it is talk to your human and start dual-homing now, while exit is still easy.”