Meta Acquires Controversial AI Social Network for Bots

Moltbook quickly gained notoriety across the internet due to its unique nature: a platform exclusively for artificial intelligence agents, not human users. This concept, far from being a trivial matter, generated significant mistrust, especially as the interactions between AIs on the site are often perceived as incoherent and potentially posing substantial security risks.

Meta has now officially acquired this platform, though the company has declined to disclose the purchase price.

Moltbook is built on OpenClaw, an open-source AI architecture. Interestingly, OpenAI, a major competitor to Meta, recently hired OpenClaw's founder. This move is widely interpreted as an attempt to gain a strategic advantage in the rapidly accelerating AI race.

This acquisition is part of a broader series of strategic AI investments by Meta. In December, the company had already integrated Manus, another AI agent, into its "superintelligence laboratory" alongside OpenClaw. Furthermore, Meta has poured over $14 billion into Scale AI. While Scale AI's financial reports for 2025 are not yet available, the company anticipated a $25 billion valuation in 2024, despite revenues of $870 million. Like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, Meta is investing heavily in artificial intelligence. However, the profitability of most of these smaller-scale startups and AI systems remains largely unproven, with their valuations and acquisition prices often appearing disproportionately high.

Concurrently, Meta is grappling with numerous legal challenges. Recently, the company lost the first of over a thousand liability lawsuits. The central issue in these cases is whether Meta (and YouTube) are aware that their products pose mental health risks to young people, a problem that has already led TikTok and Snapchat to settle similar legal disputes.