Meta admits Muse’s likeness to OpenClaw isn’t a coincidence

Meta's head of product at Superintelligence Labs, Nat Friedman, confirmed on X that the company's Muse AI assistant was "definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw," the open source personal agent created by Peter Steinberger, though Friedman said Muse was "built from scratch." The admission followed viral posts from AI app co-founder Ansh Nanda and others noting that Muse shares file names and nearly identical SOUL.md content with OpenClaw, and Friedman replied that "we thought that Peter got those things exactly right." The Muse app recently hit No. 1 on the U.S. App Store and is outpacing ChatGPT's launch, according to the report.

Early adopters of Meta’s Muse have 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 https://x.com/natfriedman/status/2102103707936768130 by Nat Friedman, head of product at Meta’s Superintelligence Labs MSL , Muse was “definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw.” However, he clarified that Muse itself was “built from scratch.” Friedman, the former GitHub CEO who joined Meta last year https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305854/alexandr-wang-and-nat-friedman/ alongside Meta’s Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang https://www.meta.com/about/leadership/alexandr-wang/ , said that the team at Meta 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 https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw project, it wouldn’t be surprising that Meta looked to it for inspiration, especially given its breakout success https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/27/everything-you-need-to-know-about-viral-personal-ai-assistant-clawdbot-now-moltbot/ , which prompted OpenAI to snatch up its creator https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/15/openclaw-creator-peter-steinberger-joins-openai/ earlier this year. However, it speaks to Meta’s well-known playbook that involves taking promising products, then copying their best features https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/29/in-antitrust-hearing-zuckerberg-admits-facebook-has-copied-its-competition/ — something it did most notoriously with Snapchat’s invention of the stories format. https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/18/will-snap-copy-the-fb-platform/ Friedman’s statement on X was made in response to a post that had gone viral among the AI crowd, where Ansh Nanda https://www.linkedin.com/in/anshnanda/ , an AI app co-founder, claimed that “Muse is LITERALLY OpenClaw for normies.” Nanda’s X post had included a conversation with Muse, where the AI agent said that the similarity between its own system files and those belonging to OpenClaw was not just “a coincidence” but rather “a match.” Soon, this thread and X more broadly began blowing up as others shared their own comparisons and findings. For instance, one person pointed https://x.com/gkeaton23/status/2101991238098354422 out that Muse also had a SOUL.md file, the plain text configuration file written in a simple formatting language called Markdown that defines an AI agent’s personality, communication style and tone, values, behavioral boundaries, and expertise. A third noted https://x.com/charlesmcdowell/status/2101692035140870603 that the files weren’t just named the same between the two assistants; their content was almost entirely the same. Following his X post, Friedman also responded to a question about why Muse had copied the exact file names that made up the AI agent’s workspace and had “nearly identical content” for the SOUL.md file. Instead of disputing these claims, Friedman simply replied that “we thought that Peter Steinberger, OpenClaw’s creator got those things exactly right.” “We built Muse from scratch, but it is definitely heavily inspired as a product by OpenClaw. After I used OpenClaw in January, I bought hundreds of Mac minis for the MSL team, and lots of us fell in love with using OpenClaw and other personal agents , Friedman said on X. TechCrunch has corrected Friedman’s punctuation for readability. “@steipete Peter Steinberger 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 been something of a hit so far, having recently hit No. 1 on the U.S. App Store. Data indicates that it’s now outpacing ChatGPT’s launch https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/21/metas-muse-is-outpacing-chatgpts-early-mobile-launch/ when the platforms and market availability are compared directly. Reached for comment, a Meta spokesperson pointed to Friedman’s statement, saying the company had nothing more to add beyond that.