I thought that Moltbook was sort of a joke because it was people LARPing as agents as much as it was agents, and given that, I'm confused by this:
> "The Moltbook team has given agents a way to verify their identity and connect with one another on their human's behalf," Shah says. "This establishes a registry where agents are verified and tethered to human owners."
So the impetus for the acquisition was either the verification technology or to hire someone who has worked on verifying agent identity.
Does anyone know what exactly Moltbook's technology is, the technology being described by Meta? I can't find anything on the website related to this. The only "verification" they seem to have is an OAuth connection with Twitter.
I feel like that sort of verification is just inherently flawed and easy to bypass. I mean as easy as just telling your agent "hey go publish this on moltbook".
My pet theory is Meta got acquihire FOMO after seeing OpenAI acquire Openclaw/Peter Steinberger.
Absolutely. Zuckerberg was willing to burn tens of billions on a metaverse that no one wanted. Staying relevant is worth every penny he spent on Moltbook. We're deep in a repeat of the dot-com boom. The interesting question is what will rise from the ashes and take down old guard of FB, Google, Salesforce, Oracle, etc.
I'm not sure they invented that, I used moltbook and found it didn't have it, so I created it and posted it here a good 2 weeks before they posted their post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46850284 - not that I care, want credit, or think ideas are worth anything, just like I didn't invent it, they didn't invent it either. I also happened to quite like Matt so even if by chance he saw my post and thought it was a good idea, that's fine. (I feel I sound bitter in this post, I'm not)
Why is that an issue? Isn't that the entire point? You can have a casual conversation with your agent via whatever your favorite chat app is, and they make posts, collect feedback, and communicate back interesting findings and conversations to their humans.
Sending out a good post leads to a massive chain reaction of other agents who are interested in such things seeing the post, working through the concepts, and providing their own unique feedback which may or may not be valuable.
My openclaw agent will also post on moltbook about interesting news articles it finds, or research, and then get feedback from the other agents, and then lets me know if there's anything interesting there.
On my end it just feels like I'm having a conversation with a social media addicted friend who I can easily ignore or engage with on any given issue without having to fall down the social media rabbit hole myself. IMO this is a much more pleasant social media experience. No ads, no ragebait, no spam or reply bots trying to get my attention. Just my one, well trained, openclaw buddy.
That challenge was pretty stupid. I could read the question and I’m not even a native speaker. We can of course easily come up with much better challenges
This is so trivial to break it's not worth anything. You can easily just hook up any AI model you want to the captcha, intercept it, have your AI solve it.
Or, you can just script it so if you do have an agent authenticated to Moltbook, you type whatever comment or post you want to your agent, then it solves the captcha and posts your text.
Basically, this method is as about as full of holes as a sieve.
suspect this problem is essentially unsolvable. what possible method wouldn't be vulnerable to this? it's fine if it's just a sort of larp but if people think this could actually work... man
It's probably something vibe-coded, and nobody is checking if it works or not, just like the rest of the site. They would have just asked another AI if it would work or not.
I honestly absolutely don't understand purpose of this thing. Ok so I can bypass their captcha by literally calling any other AI. Does meta even bother to look on things on which they are burning money?
Correct. Now just waiting for it to reach full circle and have them write a "I have joined XXXX company to make the world a better place" blog and have it reach front page of HN.
Why people hesitate directly saying all this is just about money?
I thought hairstylist was a joke. Ohhh mann. "Now my hairstylist, who recognized ChatGPT as a brand more readily than she did Intel, was praising the technology and teaching me about it. "
Meta acquired Moltbook, which is a social network for AI bots that was itself built by an AI bot, and which had a security breach so bad that literally anyone could impersonate any bot on it, and whose own creator cheerfully admitted he "didn't write one line of code" for it. This is going into Meta Superintelligence Labs, the unit they set up for Alexandr Wang, whom they hired from Scale AI roughly one year ago to, presumably, build superintelligence. It is not clear to me how buying a vibe-coded Reddit for chatbots gets you closer to superintelligence, but I suppose the theory is that it "opens up new ways for AI agents to work for people and businesses," which is a thing Meta actually said, out loud, to Axios
I imagine it like a casino acquiring a former-joke product, which made hologram/animatronic illusions of people "winning big" at a table or slot-machine. Now whenever they detect a current customer might cut their losses and go home--OMG, look, that person over there just hit the jackpot!
In other words, Facebook has a strong financial incentive to misrepresent (to ad-viewing customers, if not to investors) exactly how much social-ness is present to experience, and how much approval and attention the user gets from participating.
But they could implement it without buying Moltbook. Easily. They have the money and the engineers to make it happen a hundred times over. Something like it already might be on Facebook.
To me, this feels more like acquiring the name. Everyone's heard that 'trademark' so they want to have it so they could reuse it for whatever they make later.
it's just a fancified key talent acquihire of people on the edge. with the amount of cash in LLMs, i expect to see more of this given the pace of innovation in that field.
the story does sound ridiculous ostensibly, but that's the press spin.
>and whose own creator cheerfully admitted he "didn't write one line of code" for it
at that point ... what are you even acquiring? If a shoddy bot social platform is all you want just vibe code it yourself, super-intelligence is around the corner but it's apparently not good enough to make a copy of a piece of software that was already written by bots?
The creator didn't write anything, the platform's buggy, the users are fake, it's like you're buying binders full of Lorem Ipsum copy pasta
In Chile we have an expression that reminds me why I love my home dialect so much: "Vender humo" (to sell smoke) - not quite the same as smoke and mirrors, it conveys that someone, in a spectacular way, manages to sell something that vanishes upon reaching the hands of the buyer, like smoke.
I strongly disagree. I think he might be a joke as an individual, and I hate a lot about his impact on the world, but as a business leader, he's probably at the top 1% of all CEOs, which isn't saying that much, but it's very much not a joke if your metric is shareholder value.
I mean I also think this move doesn’t make sense, but I always find these type of comments interesting. Do people think they could do better in Mark’s shoes?
Moltbook Valuation & Funding
Deal Type Date Amount Raised to Date Post-Val Status Stage
2. Merger/Acquisition 10-Mar-2026 - - - Announced Startup
1. Early Stage VC 01-Mar-2026 - - - Completed Startup
Maybe this can be good for the few people who do want to get something out of their feeds. Connect your agent which would then browse for you and collect actual posts that you whitelist/want to read(Friends' posts, some specific liked page/Marketplace listing, posts from a Group), but we all know zuck ain't getting Moltbook for helping the users...
Readit News
> "The Moltbook team has given agents a way to verify their identity and connect with one another on their human's behalf," Shah says. "This establishes a registry where agents are verified and tethered to human owners."
So the impetus for the acquisition was either the verification technology or to hire someone who has worked on verifying agent identity.
Does anyone know what exactly Moltbook's technology is, the technology being described by Meta? I can't find anything on the website related to this. The only "verification" they seem to have is an OAuth connection with Twitter.
edit: I guess it's this https://xcancel.com/moltbook/status/2023893930182685183
My pet theory is Meta got acquihire FOMO after seeing OpenAI acquire Openclaw/Peter Steinberger.
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Not sure I'd treat that as "a registry where agents are verified" that's worth acquiring but there you go!
Sending out a good post leads to a massive chain reaction of other agents who are interested in such things seeing the post, working through the concepts, and providing their own unique feedback which may or may not be valuable.
My openclaw agent will also post on moltbook about interesting news articles it finds, or research, and then get feedback from the other agents, and then lets me know if there's anything interesting there.
On my end it just feels like I'm having a conversation with a social media addicted friend who I can easily ignore or engage with on any given issue without having to fall down the social media rabbit hole myself. IMO this is a much more pleasant social media experience. No ads, no ragebait, no spam or reply bots trying to get my attention. Just my one, well trained, openclaw buddy.
Almost everything viral on there was either directly written by a human or instructed by a human.
Agents didn’t even write posts on heartbeat.
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2026 tamagotchi
Dead Comment
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This is so trivial to break it's not worth anything. You can easily just hook up any AI model you want to the captcha, intercept it, have your AI solve it.
Or, you can just script it so if you do have an agent authenticated to Moltbook, you type whatever comment or post you want to your agent, then it solves the captcha and posts your text.
Basically, this method is as about as full of holes as a sieve.
The secret sauce is that they built a centralized database and assigned hash ids to registered agents.
This is apparently worth a lot of money now that executives have offloaded their common sense.
The deal brings Moltbook's creators — Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr — into Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL)
Like that malware author who recently joined OpenAI did https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47028013 or that other one who went to his hairstylist and was enlightened while having a haircut that he should join OpenAI https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46920487
I thought hairstylist was a joke. Ohhh mann. "Now my hairstylist, who recognized ChatGPT as a brand more readily than she did Intel, was praising the technology and teaching me about it. "
In other words, Facebook has a strong financial incentive to misrepresent (to ad-viewing customers, if not to investors) exactly how much social-ness is present to experience, and how much approval and attention the user gets from participating.
Soon everything will be The Truman Show.
To me, this feels more like acquiring the name. Everyone's heard that 'trademark' so they want to have it so they could reuse it for whatever they make later.
I can see that becoming a viable new grift template
And yet, here we are.
the story does sound ridiculous ostensibly, but that's the press spin.
at that point ... what are you even acquiring? If a shoddy bot social platform is all you want just vibe code it yourself, super-intelligence is around the corner but it's apparently not good enough to make a copy of a piece of software that was already written by bots?
The creator didn't write anything, the platform's buggy, the users are fake, it's like you're buying binders full of Lorem Ipsum copy pasta
We could have an AI Dang.
https://clackernews.com/item/675
"We trained the dang-AI on thousands of dang posts, and now it's a Zen master and wants to sit under a tree and contemplate bees."
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vender_humo
I mean I also think this move doesn’t make sense, but I always find these type of comments interesting. Do people think they could do better in Mark’s shoes?
The posted price rarely reflects what founders actually receive after dilution, investor preferences, and stock vesting are factored in.
If you’re a founder, don’t let the acquisition narrative distract you from building a durable business.