• by Colin Kirkland , May 7, 2026

Following Meta's acquisition of an artificial intelligence agentic social network, the tech giant is reportedly developing a personalized AI assistant designed to complete tasks for its 3.5 billion users across its various social-media platforms.

According to recent reports, a portion of Meta's ongoing investment in AI will be focused on creating, training and releasing a digital assistant powered by the company’s most recent multimodal reasoning model -- "Muse Spark" -- developed by its Superintelligence Labs unit.

Referred to by Meta staffers as “Hatch,” the user-facing AI agent is reportedly being developed in response to OpenAI’s OpenClaw, an open-source autonomous AI agent trained to help users carry out research, manage emails, code and more.

According to The Information, internal testing of Hatch should be completed by the end of June, with a separate agentic shopping tool to be integrated into Instagram by the end of 2026.

The reports on Hatch come two months after Meta purchased Moltbook, an agent-specific social network built to run congruently with OpenClaw.

“We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do,” said Connor Hayes, vice president of product for generative AI at Meta when the company purchased Moltbook. “They’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform . . . that’s where we see all of this going,” he told the Financial Times.

With Meta’s AI development budget heavily funded by its ad revenue, the acquisition of Moltbook may help the company automate its ad business through a faster and more seamless execution of marketing tasks by AI bots – a goal CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to see carried out by the end of this year.

Beyond attempting to potentially boost its advertising business and dominate the AI social stratosphere, it seems that Meta is also looking to bring agentic assistants directly to users.

On an earnings call following the closure of Q1, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg mentioned that the company wants to “deliver agents that can understand your goals and then work day and night to help you achieve them,” teasing what could very well be Hatch: “a personal agent focused on helping people achieve the diverse goals in their lives.”