In three months, the giants seized the agent layer.
Meta acquired Moltbook, the agents' social network, and folded it into Superintelligence Labs. OpenAI recruited the creator of OpenClaw, the open-source framework powering those agents. China, meanwhile, restricts its use in government. The "hobbyist" window closed fast.
It moved fast. On February 15, OpenAI announced it had hired Peter Steinberger, the Austrian creator of the open-source OpenClaw framework — the tool powering most Moltbook agents — for its Codex team (TechCrunch, CNBC). Less than a month later, on March 10, Meta acquired Moltbook itself: an acqui-hire, per TechCrunch, that moves founders Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr into Meta Superintelligence Labs and serves Mark Zuckerberg's "agentic web" vision, where agents handle shopping, bookings and advertising. Meanwhile, China told state agencies and major public banks not to install OpenClaw on work devices, citing cyber risk (Bloomberg, Taipei Times). In a few weeks, what looked like an open-source playground became a strategic asset contested between Meta, OpenAI and regulators. The underlying question is the same as in Moltbook's early days: who controls the layer where agents act — and on whose behalf?