Meta says Muse was "heavily inspired" by OpenClaw, built from scratch

Early adopters of Meta’s Muse had been speculating that the reason the AI works so well is because it’s OpenClaw under the hood, wrapped in a more consumer-friendly package. Meta now says those comparisons aren’t entirely off-base. According to an X post by Nat Friedman, head of product at Meta’s Superintelligence Labs (MSL), Muse was “definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw,” though he clarified that Muse itself was “built from scratch.” Friedman, the former GitHub CEO who joined Meta last year alongside Meta’s Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, said the MSL team had fallen in love with OpenClaw and wanted Muse to be “something like OpenClaw” that could be scaled to billions of people.

Because OpenClaw is an open source project, it wouldn’t be surprising that Meta looked to it for inspiration, especially given its breakout success, which prompted OpenAI to acquire its creator earlier this year. Friedman’s statement came in response to a viral post from Ansh Nanda, an AI app co-founder, who claimed “Muse is LITERALLY OpenClaw for normies,” including a conversation in which Muse itself said the similarity between its own system files and OpenClaw’s was not just “a coincidence” but rather “a match.” Others soon shared their own comparisons — one person noted that Muse also had a SOUL.md file, the plain-text configuration file that defines an AI agent’s personality, communication style, values, behavioral boundaries, and expertise, while a third noted the files weren’t just named the same between the two assistants; their content was almost entirely the same.

Friedman also responded to a question about why Muse had copied the exact file names that made up its workspace and had “nearly identical content” for the SOUL.md file, replying only that “we thought that Peter [Steinberger, OpenClaw’s creator] got those things exactly right.” “@steipete is a genius, and his harness was pioneering from the jump. I think a lot of people were inspired by it. Our goal with Muse was to build something like OpenClaw that we could make safe and secure and easy to use and scale to billions of people,” he wrote. The Muse app has recently hit No. 1 on the U.S. App Store, with data indicating it is now outpacing ChatGPT’s launch when comparing the platforms and market availability directly. A Meta spokesperson, reached for comment, pointed to Friedman’s statement, saying the company had nothing more to add.

Why it matters

Meta’s admission adds to a pattern of the company building consumer hits by closely following breakout independent products, a playbook that has drawn scrutiny before, most notably with Snapchat’s Stories format.