Last week during Meta’s earnings, Mark Zuckerberg said that the company is working on new AI agents for people and businesses on the company’s platform. Now, we know a bit more about what those plans entail, thanks to a new report from The Information.
The publication reports that Meta is working on an “OpenClaw-inspired” agent currently dubbed “Hatch.” It sounds like the company intends for Hatch to work within its own apps, including agentic shopping on Instagram, as well as with outside services. The company has tested Hatch on simulated versions of third-party services like DoorDash, Reddit and Outlook, according to The Information.
Separately, Meta also apparently intends for Hatch to help the company compete with TikTok Shop. Instagram users would be able to use the agent to more easily buy items they see in Instagram Reels. Meta may have been laying some groundwork for this with its recent move to allow creators to tag up to 30 products in a video.
The report doesn’t go into exactly how the agent will work with services Meta doesn’t own, but Zuckerberg is clearly very interested in AI agents as a way to bolster his “superintelligence” ambitions. The CEO name-checked OpenClaw in his remarks last week, saying that the agent platform was “exciting” but also too complicated for most people to set up. He said he wanted Meta’s agents to be more accessible and to “to deliver agents that can understand your goals and then work day and night to help you achieve them.”
Incidentally, Meta also reportedly tried to hire the creator of OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent platform that went extremely viral in AI circles at the start of this year. He chose to join OpenAI instead. Zuckerberg did, however, hire the founders of Moltbook, a briefly viral (and probably overhyped) forum for AI agents.
It will likely be some time before we see any of Meta’s planned agentic capabilities. The company is looking to launch the new tools closer to the end of the year, according to the report. Meta is also reportedly testing the agents with Anthropic models, rather than its own, though the plan is for them to eventually run on the company’s new Muse Spark model.
Meta’s ambitions in the space may also encompass its smart glasses lineup. Though the report didn’t mention agents in the context of the Meta-branded eyewear, an exec recently hinted at the possibility. Speaking during a follow-up call with analysts last week, CFO Susan Li said that the Ray-Ban Meta glasses “provide what we believe is the best form factor for agentic interactions,” though she acknowledged it was “very early” for such capabilities.
