Meta has acknowledged that its new AI assistant Muse was strongly inspired by the open-source project OpenClaw, while maintaining that Muse was implemented from scratch. Nat Friedman, head of product at Meta’s Superintelligence Labs (MSL), wrote this in a post on X.
Friedman — the former GitHub CEO who joined Meta last year alongside Alexandr Wang, Meta’s Chief AI Officer — said the MSL team had become enthusiastic about OpenClaw and wanted Muse to be "something like OpenClaw" that could be scaled for billions of users.
The topic gained widespread attention after Ansh Nanda, an AI app co-founder, posted on X claiming that "Muse is LITERALLY OpenClaw for normies." Nanda included a conversation with Muse in which the assistant suggested that the similarity between its system files and those of OpenClaw was not merely "a coincidence" but rather "a match."
The thread spread quickly as others compared the two systems. Some observers noted that Muse also contained a SOUL.md file — a plain-text configuration file written in Markdown that defines an AI agent’s personality, communication style, values, behavioral boundaries, and areas of expertise. Others reported that not only did filenames match, but the contents of those files were nearly identical.
When asked why Muse used the exact same filenames and why the SOUL.md content was "nearly identical," Friedman did not dispute the observations. Instead he replied that "we thought that Peter [Steinberger, OpenClaw’s creator] got those things exactly right."
In his X post Friedman said he used OpenClaw in January and subsequently purchased "hundreds of Mac minis" for the MSL team; many people on the team grew fond of OpenClaw and other personal agents. TechCrunch noted that it corrected Friedman’s punctuation for readability in its coverage.
Friedman praised Peter Steinberger, writing that "@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."
The Muse app has performed well commercially: it recently reached No. 1 on the U.S. App Store. Available data indicate that Muse’s rollout is outpacing ChatGPT’s launch when platforms and market availability are compared directly.
A Meta spokesperson pointed to Friedman’s statement when asked for comment and said the company had nothing further to add.
Why this matters
The episode highlights how open-source projects can influence large technology companies’ product development. OpenClaw’s early success and design choices provided an inspiration that Meta adapted into a consumer-focused product built on its own architecture. The case also echoes Meta’s past approach of adopting and scaling promising features from other products for broader audiences.
