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 deal will bring Moltbook co-founders Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr into Meta Superintelligence Labs, the unit led by Alexandr Wang, former Scale AI CEO, which Meta purchased for $14.8bn. Meta did not disclose financial terms of the deal. Schlicht and Parr are expected to begin at Meta Superintelligence Labs on 16 March.

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.

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.

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

“Moltbook maybe [is a passing fad] but OpenClaw is not,” Altman said.

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, which he dubbed 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 the site’s owners.