Orkut founder reclaims brand from Google, plans AI-built comeback

By Amara Osei

Twelve years after Google retired Orkut, the social network's founder has reclaimed its intellectual property and is building a comeback — with Anthropic's Claude doing much of the engineering work.

Orkut Büyükkökten, the Turkish engineer who created the service in 2004 and named it after himself, told Brazil's O Globo he recovered the full IP from Google only "toward the end of last year." A petition launched in recent weeks is designed less as a nostalgia exercise than as a demand test for a new incarnation of the platform famous in Brazil for "testimonials" and "scraps."

The timeline is undefined. "The deadline is not set yet," he said. "It depends on the resources we raise and how fast that happens."

How does AI fit the relaunch?

The irony is structural: a platform pitched as an antidote to synthetic content is only buildable because of it. "We have a small team, and AI has changed the world in terms of building software, especially since February," Büyükkökten said. "Things that would take months to launch now take just a few days, thanks to technologies like Claude."

He now uses Claude heavily after years on ChatGPT. "It feels like I have about ten engineers and designers working for me," he said. "The sky is the limit." That promise deserves a caveat: speed of building is not speed of scaling, and no launch date or funding figure was disclosed.

Why bring Orkut back at all?

Büyükkökten argues current platforms buried human connection under engagement metrics — sessions, followers, time spent — producing what he calls "an epidemic of loneliness." AI raises the stakes: "Now, with AI, you can no longer know for sure whether what you read comes from a human heart and mind," he said, claiming that more than half of YouTube videos and more than half of online text are now AI-generated.

He cited survey figures on American teenagers: 72% have used an AI chatbot as a "companion," half use one regularly, and a third have shared something deeply intimate with a chatbot. "The question is no longer whether you're talking to an acquaintance or a stranger. It's whether it's a human being or a machine."

Is there still a market?

The brand's residual value is the strongest asset on the table. A market survey conducted in Brazil a few months ago found Orkut still has 91% brand recognition — a level he puts on par with Reddit, LinkedIn and Facebook. He claims Gen Z and Gen Alpha know the brand well, often through parents and older siblings.

On business model, he is candid that ads funded the original and can again, describing a "healthy cycle between companies and consumers." He accuses platforms like Meta of amplifying hateful, outrage-driving content because engagement rose, and says the new Orkut will "optimize for happiness, connection, community, belonging" — measurable, he insists, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Whether that metric survives contact with ad revenue remains unproven.

What about moderation and regulation?

Content moderation, he said, needs three components: AI-backed technology, human moderators with final say on hard cases, and community self-policing — the model the original Orkut ran on.

On regulation he is split: government oversight of platforms worries him because policy "can be different depending on who is in power," but he believes corporations should be held accountable for lacking tools to stop misinformation. "Millions of human beings died because they didn't get vaccinated due to fake news on social networks," he said.

Can it compete with Instagram and TikTok?

Not on budget — on the social graph. Friend lists have become "completely polluted" over two decades, he argued, with hundreds of followers that carry no meaning and may not even belong to real people. He also sees an opening with creators: AI influencers are making human content creation "exponentially harder," and current platforms, in his view, exploit influencers rather than support them.

The first Orkut scaled from an expected 200,000 users to one million within months on a single machine Büyükkökten installed himself at a data center. The infrastructure bottleneck is gone this time; proving the demand and the funding are the remaining constraints.