Meta’s ‘Digital Ghost’ Patent Is Active—but It Isn’t a Facebook Feature

Meta Platforms Technologies now holds an active U.S. patent for a system that can generate social-network interactions on behalf of an absent user, including someone who has died. The U.S. patent record shows that Patent No. 12,513,102 was granted on December 30, 2025, replacing the earlier application-only status in the United States.

That procedural change does not mean Facebook is preparing to activate digital versions of deceased users. A Meta spokesperson told Fast Company in February 2026 that the company had “no plans to move forward with this example,” and no public product announcement has established that the patented system is available on Facebook, Instagram or Threads.

What Meta’s patent actually describes

The invention is more specific than a general chatbot trained to sound like a particular person. It describes a social-networking system that monitors items selected for a user’s feed, asks a language model to predict how that user would interact with a relevant item, and then performs the predicted interaction. Meta Platforms Technologies is the assignee, while Meta chief technology officer Andrew Garrod Bosworth is named as the inventor.

The proposed workflow has several connected parts:

• A pretrained language model is retrained with data derived from the target user’s previous activity.
• The platform identifies feed content considered relevant to that user, including material posted by another account.
• A prompt supplies the content and contextual information to the model and requests a likely response.
• The system can post a textual response or register another interaction, such as a like, on the target user’s behalf.

Death is explicitly contemplated in the patent’s specification: the system may simulate someone taking a long break or a user who is deceased. The document also describes optional embodiments involving direct messages, generated audio for calls and model-produced video. Those examples illustrate possible implementations; they should not be treated as evidence that Meta has built or deployed every described capability.

The granted claims focus on the technical sequence linking a user-trained model, ranked newsfeed content, contextual prompting and an automatically performed interaction. This distinction matters because a patent’s detailed description can be broader than the enforceable claims. The phrase about deceased users explains a contemplated use case, but the core independent claim is framed around predicting and carrying out social-network activity rather than around death itself.

A patent is not a product launch

A granted patent gives its owner legal rights over the claimed invention; it does not certify that the system is safe, commercially practical or ready for users. Nor does it compel Meta to implement the design. Companies routinely patent architectures that remain experimental, defensive or unused, so “Meta patented it” and “Facebook offers it” are materially different statements.

The international record also needs to be separated from the U.S. result. The related PCT publication, WO2025117006A1, may still appear as pending even though the corresponding U.S. patent has been granted and is listed as active. Calling the entire matter merely a pending patent application is therefore outdated, while calling it a released Meta service goes much further than the evidence allows.

The specification says generated interactions can be identified as products of a simulation rather than the real user. It also presents a permissions mechanism under which a person could allow certain categories of activity to become training data while excluding others—for example, permitting comments but withholding one-to-one messages. These safeguards exist on paper within the proposed architecture; their presence does not establish what consent controls, disclosure language or enforcement would exist in a real product.

Facebook’s current treatment of deceased accounts is different

Facebook’s documented system remains based on memorialization, deletion and limited management by a legacy contact. The platform’s current memorialized-account rules say that existing posts remain visible to their original audiences, nobody can log into the memorialized account, and the profile is removed from areas such as advertisements, birthday reminders and people-you-may-know suggestions.

That is almost the opposite of the patented simulation. Memorialization preserves material the person actually created and allows other people to contribute memories; the patent describes generating new interactions attributed to a model of the absent user. A legacy contact can perform defined administrative actions, but Facebook’s published policy does not give that person access to private messages or permission to impersonate the deceased.

For users deciding what should happen to their accounts, the available choices therefore remain the existing ones: selecting a legacy contact, allowing memorialization or requesting deletion after death where the setting is available. The patent itself does not alter those choices, enroll accounts in AI training or create a new setting that families must disable.

The unresolved problem is authority, not technical mimicry

The design’s most consequential questions begin after a model becomes convincing enough to act. Permission to use selected posts for training is not necessarily permission to publish unlimited new statements after the person can no longer review them. A workable system would need clear answers about who can activate it, withdraw consent, inspect its data, correct false output and permanently shut it down.

Other people’s rights are involved as well. Messages, photographs and conversations contain information about friends, relatives and colleagues who may never have agreed to become training material for a posthumous persona. Even a visibly labeled simulation could produce statements that distort relationships, disclose sensitive context or create the impression that the deceased endorsed events that happened later.

The verified update is consequently narrower—and more significant—than the original “digital resurrection” framing. Meta’s user-simulation architecture is no longer only a U.S. application: it became an active patent at the end of 2025. But Meta’s public position and Facebook’s existing memorialization rules still point to the same practical conclusion for users: the company has secured intellectual-property rights to a possible system, not switched on an AI replacement for people who die.

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