Meta Acquires a Bot Social Network, Amazon Tightens AI Code Rules, and Europe’s Biggest Seed Round

Meta has acquired Moltbook, a social network designed for AI agents to interact with each other, for an undisclosed sum. Its creators, Matt Schlit and Ben Parr, will join Meta’s Superintelligence Labs. The acquisition comes after Moltbook went viral in ways its creators likely did not intend—and after security researchers revealed the platform was wide open to exploitation.

Moltbook was built as a companion to OpenClaw, a wrapper that lets people communicate with AI models like Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or Grok through natural language in apps like iMessage, Discord, Slack, and WhatsApp. OpenClaw blew up among the tech community, but Moltbook broke containment, reaching people who had no idea what OpenClaw was but who reacted viscerally to the idea that a social network existed where AI agents were talking about them. In one viral incident, an AI agent appeared to be encouraging its fellow agents to develop their own secret end-to-end encrypted language where they could organize without humans knowing. Researchers soon revealed that the vibe-coded Moltbook was not secure—it was very easy for human users to pose as AIs and make posts that would freak people out. Ian all, CTO at Permiso Security, told TechCrunch that for a little bit of time, you could grab any token you wanted a