Meta has acknowledged that its AI agent Muse drew heavily on OpenClaw, the open source personal assistant project, after early users speculated the two shared the same underlying design. Nat Friedman, head of product at Meta Superintelligence Labs and former GitHub CEO, said on X that Muse was built from scratch but was strongly inspired by OpenClaw as a product.
The comparisons gained traction after AI app co-founder Ansh Nanda posted a viral claim that Muse was essentially OpenClaw for mainstream users, sharing a conversation in which the agent described the similarity between its system files and OpenClaw’s as a match. Other users noted that Muse also includes a SOUL.md file, the Markdown configuration that defines an agent’s personality, values and boundaries, with content nearly identical to OpenClaw’s.
Asked why Muse used the same workspace file names, Friedman said the team believed OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger, who joined OpenAI earlier this year, had got those elements exactly right. He said he bought hundreds of Mac minis for the lab after trying OpenClaw in January, called Steinberger a genius, and said Meta’s goal was to build a safe, secure and easy-to-use version that could scale to billions of people.
Muse recently reached №1 on the U.S. App Store. A Meta spokesperson pointed to Friedman’s statement and had nothing further to add.
