Meta is building a consumer version of the AI agent OpenClaw and a new agentic shopping tool, according to The Information sources. Meta tried to acquire OpenClaw earlier this year, but its creator, Peter Steinberger, ended up being acqui-hired by OpenAI instead, so this is apparently the company's response.
The goal of the OpenClaw-inspired agent, which the company is internally calling “Hatch,” is to be able to perform a range of tasks for users such as ordering food on DoorDash, buying gifts on Etsy, scrolling Reddit, finding restaurants on Yelp, or managing e-mail in Outlook.
Meta has already built a “sandboxed” web environment where the agent can be tested on simulations of real websites, with the goal of doing live internal testing by the end of June. Meta also plans to integrate the agentic shopping tool into Instagram and is targeting a launch before Q4 this year, according to sources.
A kind of funny detail about this news story is that Hatch is currently being powered by Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 and Claude Sonnet 4.6 models, instead of a Meta AI model, but the company plans to power the agent with Meta's Muse Spark when it actually launches.
Last week Mark Zuckerberg said on an earnings call that Meta's goal is “to deliver agents that can understand your goals and then work day and night to help you achieve them,” while noting that the company is increasing its capital spend on AI infrastructure this year to as much as $145B.
Alongside the agentic push, Meta officially announced that it will be changing its company name from “Meta” to “Agentic,” recognizing that the company completely botched the last rebrand. (j/k)
